An Ontology-Driven Discovery Architecture to Support Service Composition

In the service collaboration field, there exists the need to combine two or more services together to fulfill a complex goal. Though service composition is an active research field, most of solutions are focused on Web services and lack of the consideration for business-level collaboration. In this paper we present a discovery architecture that supports business-level service composition. In our architecture, ontologies are adopted to give well-defined semantic meanings for knowledge, service offers and requests. According to decomposition templates and ontologies, the service goal of a request is decomposed to several sub-goals. Then the services that match sub-goals can be discovered in isolation. Finally, the semantic compatibility between relevant services is checked and the feasible service combinations that fulfill the whole request can be formed. We discuss the discovery approach, and show the possibility of fulfilling a request with the composition of services.