Bringing Web Principles to Services: Ontology-BasedWeb Services

Researchers are beginning to realize the potential of Web services that can use the Web as a place for information publication and access as opposed to the traditional Web- services paradigm that merely uses the Web as a transport medium. Traditional Web services can be difficult to discover, can have complex invocation APIs, and require strong coupling between communicating applications. In previous work, we presented ontology-based techniques in which users make service requests using free-form, natural- language-like specifications. This paper shows how we can use these ontological techniques to automatically create ontology-based Web services that (1) are easy for software agents to discover because they are created based on machine-processable formalisms (ontologies), (2) have invocation APIs requiring only simple read and write operations, and (3) require no a priori agreements regarding types and data formats between communicating applications. Experiments with our prototype implementation in several domains show that our approach can effectively create Web services with these characteristics.