A Conceptual Service Discovery Architecture for Semantic Web Services in Dynamic Environments

PurposeResource allocation is challenged by dynamic environments where changes are frequent. The purpose of this paper is to identify resource allocation challenges and practices in service units that perform both project and non-project activities in dynamic environments. Its goal is to show that top-down mechanisms of project resource allocation need to be replaced by or supplemented with mechanisms that are more flexible.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative comparative case study was conducted in two service units of two project-based firms. The main source of data consisted of semi-structured interviews with 17 service managers and staff members.FindingsThis study shows that resource allocation is not necessarily a top-down process at all, and the practices are context-dependent. Two more flexible approaches are revealed – hybrid resource allocation and bottom-up resource allocation – as examples of managing resource allocation in service units that engage in projects under uncertain conditions. The results of the analysis highlight prioritisation and adapting to change and delay as the main issues that managers face in allocating resources to different types of projects and service activities in dynamic environments.Research limitations/implicationsThe two target companies chosen for the qualitative research design limit the analysis to project-based firms in a business-to-business context. Further, the viewpoint of the service unit is central to the study. Studying project resource allocation in different organisational contexts and uncovering the perspectives of product development and delivery units would offer promising directions for future research.Practical implicationsThe study reveals that in dynamic project settings such as service organisations, top-down mechanisms of resource allocation need to be accompanied by other, more flexible approaches to ensure the sufficient resourcing of projects and related services in dynamic environments. Companies need to establish practices for resource allocation changes that are caused by re-prioritising tasks and accommodating changes and delays in their project and service activities.Originality/valueCompared to a top-down perspective taken in previous research, the study proposes a more flexible approach for resource allocation in constantly changing environments with different project and service activities. Previous studies have focussed on resource competition between projects, placing project managers in the central role for resource allocation. By contrast, this study discusses hybrid and bottom-up resource allocation, both of which involve broader personnel engagement in resource allocation tasks, drawing on the experience of all employees.

Background/Objectives: This article proposes a novel methodology based on rubrics and feature-based schemes for the appraisal and comparison of approaches to semantic Web services composition and discovery. Methods/Statistical analysis: In order to evaluate the Semantic Web services composition and discovery approaches we created a new framework called RFSWS. This framework is the combination of traditional feature-based evaluation schemes and newly developed analytic rubrics tables. Five recently introduced prominent Semantic Web services composition approaches were identified, explained, and then evaluated/compared using RFSWS. Findings: In this work we determined aspects of Semantic Web services composition and discovery processes that can be evaluated as performance criteria in rubric tables. This is a novel application of rubrics, which have traditionally been used for grading student performance by teachers. We created a novel framework called RFSWS consisting of rubric tables and a feature-based evaluation scheme for the evaluation and comparison of Semantic Web service discovery and composition approaches, and applied it in the evaluation of five recently introduced prominent Semantic Web services composition approaches. Considering the shortcomings of existing Semantic Web services composition approaches that were discovered through this evaluation, we proposed an idealized dynamic Semantic Web service discovery and composition method, a yardstick by which all future Semantic Web services composition approaches can be evaluated. Application/ Improvements: Our novel RFSWS framework can be applied in the comprehensive and systematic evaluation/comparison of Semantic Web services discovery and composition approaches.

Matching web services and client requirements in the form of goals is a significant challenge in the discovery of semantic web services. The most common but unsatisfactory approach to matching is set‐based, where both the client and web services declare what objects they require and what objects they can provide. Matching then becomes the simple task of comparing sets of objects. This approach is inadequate because it says nothing about the functionality required by the client or the functionality provided by the web service. As an alternative, we use the Frame Logic as implemented in Flora‐2 to specify web service capabilities and client requirements, including their preconditions, postconditions, and ontologies, implement a logic‐based discovery agent using Flora‐2, demonstrate its usefulness in a medical appointment making scenario, and show its efficiency both theoretically and by benchmarking. The result is an expressive yet concise representation scheme for semantic web services, and a practical, efficient, powerful, and fully implemented matching engine based purely on logical inference for web service discovery, with direct applicability to Web Service Modeling Ontology and Web Service Modeling Language, because both are based on Frame Logic.

Semantic Web Services are a search effort to automate the usage of Web services, a necessary component for the Semantic Web. Traditionally, Web service discovery depends on detail formal semantic descriptions of available services. Since a complete detailed service is not always feasible, the client software cannot select the best service offer for a given user goal only by using the static service descriptions. Dynamic discovery based on semantic description of services is an essential aspect of the Semantic Web Service integration process Some data needs to be obtained during run0time because not all data required for service discovery can always be included in service descriptions. This paper shows when and why complete semantic description is unfeasible and it defines the role and position of offer discovery. We propose an approach for offer discovery of semantic web services using OWL-S IDE during discovery process. We also present the algorithm, the implementation and some preliminary results.

- The digital transformation of supply chain management has led companies to explore web-based solutions to retain their market presence. Service-oriented technologies are increasingly deployed to support competition in the trade sector, offering flexible integration options. The primary focus is to achieve interoperability across diverse data systems and to enable automatic discovery and execution of semantic web services. This paper examines several techniq ues that aim to improve semantic alignment and service discovery. The first part explores semantic web service search methods based on structured case-based reasoning (S-CBR), OWL-S, and similarity measurement techniques. The second part presents a hybrid knowledge-based system using Semantic Web Service Architecture (SWSA) and a semantic comparison algorithm for ontological terms.

Main challenges to the current semantic web service technologies are exponential continuous growth in the number of services on the Internet, syntax based discovery, lack of common agreed upon semantic service standards and heterogeneity of ontologies. In this paper, a service discovery approach independent of semantic service description models is proposed to solve the challenges of the current web service discovery. The idea is to combine principles from machine learning, data mining, statistical techniques and measures of semantic relatedness to make the semantic web service discovery process more intelligent, efficient and effective. The proposed approach exploits the use of semantic as well as syntactic information present within the service description profiles. Our approach is unique in terms of its application to any web service description language and the use of Omiotis measure of semantic relatedness for service discovery. The proposed approach has been implemented on OWL-S based service descriptions profiles and is able to find semantic relationship between the services which were otherwise discarded by the OWL-MX matchmaker. Empirical analysis shows that the proposed method out performs the

Dynamic Web service composition is challenging problem and has been intensively investigated in recent years. Nevertheless, most of existing approaches do not provide satisfactory composition results, especially when confronted with a large scale of services. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm called HRLPLA for composing Web services. The algorithm considers functional properties and QoS properties simultaneously. By using hierarchical reinforcement learning, it can deal with large scales of services and generate efficient service compositions. Moreover, the algorithm is suitable for composing Web services in dynamic environment, as reinforcement learning his highly adaptive. We conducted experimental study to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in dynamic service composition.

Web services and service oriented architectures present a new approach to application integration. While it is reasonable inside an enterprise, it has certain deficiencies when applied in a B2B environment. These deficiencies apply to the discovery, invocation and composition phases, which require considerable manual effort. In the paper, we show on example of a mortgage simulator how these deficiencies can be overcome by applying semantic Web services. The application is compatible with the Web services modelling ontology and makes use of an execution environment automating the processes of discovery, composition and invocation of semantic Web services, enabling faster and cheaper B2B application integration

Directory services are a genuine constituent of any distributed architecture which facilitate binding attributes to names and then querying this information, that is, announcing and discovering resources. In such contexts, especially in a business environment, Quality of Service (QoS) and non-functional properties are usually the most important criteria to decide whether a specific resource will be used. To address this problem, we present an approach to the semantic description and discovery of web services which specifically takes into account their QoS properties. Our solution uses a robust trust and reputation model to provide an accurate picture of the actual QoS to user. The search engine is based on an algebraic discovery model and uses adaptive query-processing techniques to parallelise expensive operators. Architecturally, the engine can be run as a centralised service for small-scale environments or can be distributed among any number of cooperating registry providers.

An weighted ontology-based semantic similarity algorithm for web service

Summary form only given. The emerging concept of semantic Web services aims at more sophisticated Web Service technologies: on basis of semantic description frameworks, intelligent mechanisms are envisioned for discovery, composition, and contracting of Web services. The tutorial explains the current state of the art in semantic Web services on basis of the Web service modeling ontology WSMO and related initiatives. Commencing from the vision and arising challenges for semantic Web services, the tutorial in detail explains the specifications of recent frameworks for semantic Web services and presents the Web service execution environment WSMX as the WSMO reference implementation. The tutorial consists of three main sections that subsequently provide a complete overview of semantic Web services and the latest status of WSMO. The tutorial addresses academic as well as industrial researches and developers that are working with Web services and are interested in semantic Web services.

With the development of Web services technology, the number of service increases rapidly, and it becomes a challenge task that how to efficiently discovery the services that exactly match the user's requirements from the large scale of services library. Many semantic Web services discovery technologies proposed by the recent literatures only focus on the keyword-based or primary semantic based service's matching. This paper studies the rules and rule reasoning based service matching algorithm in the background of large scale services library. Firstly, the formal descriptions of semantic web services and service matching is presented. The services' matching are divided into four levels: Exact, Plugin, Subsume and Fail and their formal descriptions are also presented. Then, the service matching is regarded as rule-based reasoning issues. A set of match rules are firstly given and the related services set is retrieved from services ontology base through rule-based reasoning, and their matching levels are determined by distinguishing the relationships between service's I/O and user's request I/O. Finally, the experiment based on two services sets show that the proposed services matching strategy can easily implement the smart service discovery and obtains the high service discovery efficiency in comparison with the traditional global traversal strategy.

Semantic Web Service technology provides a strong support for automation software development based on Web service. By analyzing the existing description models and methods of semantic Web service, a Semantic Web Service Description Model (WSDM4S) and its formal description based on SHOIN+(D) are proposed, which attempt to offer an effective model for description, publication, discovery, composition, and execution of Web services based on semantic description. And a Semantic Web Service Description Language (WSDL4S) based on XML is designed to support the WSDM4S. Based on WSDL4S, Web Services could be packaged into basic semantic unit of semantic software development.

Semantic Web services are self describing programs that can be searched, understood and used by other programs. Despite the advantages Semantic Web services provide, specially for building agent based systems, there is a need for mechanisms to enable agents to discover Semantic Web services. This paper describes an extension of the MoviLog agent platform for searching Web services taking into account their semantic descriptions. Preliminary experiments showing encouraging results are also reported.

Traditional EA concepts in the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) domain focus on ex-post integration of application interfaces by pipelining different middleware technologies like message queuing or remote method invocations [1, 2]. Web Service enabled Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) used in the EAI context were a step towards providing an abstraction layer for the involved interfaces by using the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). The idea of SOA enlarges by applying Semantic Web Services (SWS) technology to it. OWL-S and WSMO are two examples for concrete implementation approaches in this area [3, 4], and we will demonstrate semantic WSMO framework, and how it can solve the problems of traditional SOA.