Semantic Web Services
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The Semantic Web Semantic Web Services Sheila A. McIlraith, Tran Cao Son, and Honglei Zeng, Stanford University he Web, once solely a repository for text and images, is evolving into a provider Tof services—information-providing services, such as flight information providers, temperature sensors, and cameras, and world-altering services, such as flight-booking programs, sensor controllers, and a variety of e-commerce and business-to-business applications. Web-accessible programs, databases, damental component of the Semantic Web will be the sensors, and a variety of other physical devices real- markup of Web services to make them computer-inter- The authors propose the ize these services. In the next decade, computers will pretable, use-apparent, and agent-ready. This article most likely be ubiquitous, and most devices will have addresses precisely this component. markup of Web services some sort of computer inside them. Vint Cerf, one We present an approach to Web service markup that of the fathers of the Internet, views the population provides an agent-independent declarative API cap- in the DAML family of of the Internet by smart devices as the harbinger of turing the data and metadata associated with a service a new revolution in Internet technology. together with specifications of its properties and capa- Semantic Web markup Today’s Web was designed primarily for human bilities, the interface for its execution, and the prereq- interpretation and use. Nevertheless, we are seeing uisites and consequences of its use. Markup exploits languages. This markup increased automation of Web service interoperation, ontologies to facilitate sharing, reuse, composition, primarily in B2B and e-commerce applications. Gen- mapping, and succinct local Web service markup. Our enables a wide variety of erally, such interoperation is realized through APIs that vision is partially realized by Web service markup in a incorporate hand-coded information-extraction code to dialect of the newly proposed DAML family of Seman- agent technologies for locate and extract content from the HTML syntax of a tic Web markup languages.4 Such so-called semantic Web page presentation layout. Unfortunately, when a markup of Web services creates a distributed knowl- automated Web service Web page changes its presentation layout, the API must edge base. This provides a means for agents to populate be modified to prevent failure. Fundamental to having their local KBs so that they can reason about Web ser- discovery, execution, computer programs or agents1 implement reliable, vices to perform automatic Web service discovery, exe- large-scale interoperation of Web services is the need to cution, and composition and interoperation. composition, and make such services computer interpretable—to create To illustrate this claim, we present an agent tech- a Semantic Web2 of services whose properties, capa- nology based on reusable generic procedures and interoperation. The bilities, interfaces, and effects are encoded in an unam- customizing user constraints that exploits and show- biguous, machine-understandable form. cases our Web service markup. This agent technol- authors present one The realization of the Semantic Web is underway ogy is realized using the first-order language of the with the development of new AI-inspired content situation calculus and an extended version of the such technology for markup languages, such as OIL,3 DAML+OIL agent programming language ConGolog,5 together (www.daml.org/2000/10/daml-oil), and DAML-L (the with deductive machinery. automated Web service last two are members of the DARPA Agent Markup Figure 1 illustrates the basic components of our Language (DAML) family of languages).4 These lan- Semantic Web services framework. It is composed of composition. guages have a well-defined semantics and enable the semantic markup of Web services, user constraints, and markup and manipulation of complex taxonomic and Web agent generic procedures. In addition to the logical relations between entities on the Web. A fun- markup, our framework includes a variety of agent tech- 46 1094-7167/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS nologies—specialized services that use an agent broker to send requests for service to appropriate Web services and to dispatch ser- Web procedures Web service vice responses back to the agent. ontologies ontologies Automating Web services To realize our vision of Semantic Web ser- vices, we are creating semantic markup of Web services that makes them machine Agent broker understandable and use-apparent. We are also developing agent technology that exploits this semantic markup to support automated Web Semantic markup of Semantic markup of service composition and interoperability. Dri- personal or company Web service sites constraints and preferences ving the development of our markup and Email ... agent technology are the automation tasks that semantic markup of Web services will enable —in particular, service discovery, execution, Knowledge and composition and interoperation. base Automatic Web service discovery involves Semantic-markup-enabled automatically locating Web services that pro- agent technology vide a particular service and that adhere to requested properties. A user might say, for Figure 1. A framework for Semantic Web services. example, “Find a service that sells airline tick- ets between San Francisco and Toronto and that accepts payment by Diner’s Club credit execute—and potentially interact with—the efforts have focused primarily on improving card.” Currently, a human must perform this service automatically. Web service discovery and aspects of service task, first using a search engine to find a service Automatic Web service composition and execution through initiatives such as the Uni- and then either reading the Web page associ- interoperation involves the automatic selec- versal Description, Discovery, and Integration ated with that service or executing the service tion, composition, and interoperation of (UDDI) standard service registry; the XML- to see whether it adheres to the requested prop- appropriate Web services to perform some based Web Service Description Language erties. With semantic markup of services, we task, given a high-level description of the (WSDL), released in September 2000 as a can specify the information necessary for Web task’s objective. A user might say, “Make the framework-independent Web service descrip- service discovery as computer-interpretable travel arrangements for my IJCAI 2001 con- tion language; and ebXML, an initiative of the semantic markup at the service Web sites, and ference trip.” Currently, if some task requires United Nations and OASIS (Organization for a service registry or (ontology-enhanced) a composition of Web services that must inter- the Advancement of Structured Information search engine can automatically locate appro- operate, then the user must select the Web ser- Standards) to standardize a framework for priate services. vices, manually specify the composition, en- trading partner interchange. Automatic Web service execution involves sure that any software for interoperation is E-business infrastructure companies are a computer program or agent automatically custom-created, and provide the input at beginning to announce platforms to support executing an identified Web service. A user choice points (for example, selecting a flight some level of Web-service automation. Exam- could request, “Buy me an airline ticket from from among several options). With semantic ples of such products include Hewlett-Packard’s www.acmetravel.com on UAL Flight 1234 markup of Web services, the information nec- e-speak, a description, registration, and dynamic from San Francisco to Toronto on 3 March.” essary to select, compose, and respond to ser- discovery platform for e-services; Microsoft’s To execute a particular service on today’s vices is encoded at the service Web sites. We .NET and BizTalk tools; Oracle’s Dynamic Ser- Web, such as buying an airline ticket, a user can write software to manipulate this markup, vices Framework; IBM’s Application Frame- generally must go to the Web site offering that together with a specification of the task’s work for E-Business; and Sun’s Open Network service, fill out a form, and click a button to objectives, to achieve the task automatically. Environment. VerticalNet Solutions, anticipat- execute the service. Alternately, the user might Service composition and interoperation lever- ing and wishing to accelerate the markup of send an http request directly to the service age automatic discovery and execution. services for discovery, is building ontologies URL with the appropriate parameters en- Of these three tasks, none is entirely real- and tools to organize and customize Web ser- coded. Either case requires a human to under- izable with today’s Web, primarily because of vice discovery and—with its OSM Platform— stand what information is required to execute a lack of content markup and a suitable is delivering an infrastructure that coordinates the service and to interpret the information the markup language. Academic research on Web Web services for public and private trading service returns. Semantic markup of Web ser- service discovery is growing out of agent exchanges. vices provides a declarative, computer-inter- matchmaking research such as the Lark sys- What distinguishes our work in this arena pretable API for executing services. The tem,6 which proposes a representation for is our semantic markup of Web