KASWS - Karlsruhe Semantic Web Services Framework

Architecture

As depicted in Figure 1, the KASWS framework provides a KASWS server and a KASWS client.

KASWS Server

• Service Descriptions Repository: The service repository is a collection of semantic service descriptions. The repository contains service descriptions, domain ontologies and mappings among ontologies. The service descriptions repository is basically a KAON2 knowledge base. For representation of the mappings using KAON2 our system relies on the approach presented by Haase and Motik 2005. The KOAN2 Ontology Management API contain methods for creating and managing ontologies. While the domain ontologies and mappings among them can be directly managed with KAON2, we created a process ontology to manage the behavior (choreography and orchestration) of a service as ontology instances.
• KASWS Service Description Management: The KASWS Service Description Mgmt. provides methods for creating, editing and deleting service descriptions. This API uses the KAON2 Ontology Mgmt. API for manipulating the repository. Via this API a client is able to upload and edit repository entires, to define mapping between ontologies and to query the content of the repository.
• The KASWS reasoner provides methods for creating a request. Furthermore, it provides a method for checking whether the service S is a model of the formula F. Only if it is a model, the set of conditions is relevant. The KASWS reasoner is basically a temporal logic reasoner that uses the KAON2 reasoner for reasoning about ontologies. The client tool can be used to graphically specify a service request The server returns a list of matches that is ranked according to the preferences of the client.
• KASWS Web Service: The methods of KASWS reasoner are provided as Web services such that any user system, not necessarily written in Java, can use our discovery algorithm and bind the found services in the system.

KASWS Client

The client tool allows managing information in the repository and querying the repository in order to find a required service.

• Model Business Processes: The client GUI allows users to model business processes graphically. While modeling a business processs, a user can search for services, browse the results and incorporate the appropriate services in his business process. For the purpose of searching and composing services, the KASWS Web service is used.
• The service annotation supports a service annotator to model a new services and the corresponding ontology graphically, which can then be added to the repository. It also allows for editing or deleting already existing service descriptions, ontologies and ontology mappings. In the current implementation, there is no user or right management, such that currently any body with the service annotation client can edit or delete any descriptions. In future, we wish to restrict editing and deletion of only those descriptions that have been added by added by the user. A semantic service description can then be published by uploading it to service description repository via the KASWS Service Description Mgmt.

Bibliography and Related Publications

The theories and concepts, which KASWS is based on, have been published in over 20 articles in international journals and conferences. List of Publications