Ontology-enhanced description of traceability services

Web services are software components that were designed to improve interoperability and integration of applications developed on different platforms. Automatic Web service composition and dynamic service discovery and selection are the most promising features that can be provided by Web services. These features can be achieved by adding semantics to the different layers of the Web service conceptual stack. The semantic information is provided by ontologies. This paper proposes an ontology model which allows semantic annotation of Web services aiming at automatic Web service composition for food chain traceability. The proposed model consists of a core ontology and two categories of taxonomic trees: Business Service Description trees and Business Product Description trees. The model has been implemented in the framework of the Food-Trace project for traceability in the domain of meat industry.