An active ontology-based blackboard architecture for Web service interoperability

Web services are functional, independent components that can be called over the Web to perform a task. Web services are provided by organizations to enable others to perform tasks the organization offers online. However, with an ever increasing number of Web services, finding the Web service that performs a certain task is not always easy. Furthermore, adopting an end-user point of view what is needed is the actual result and not the service per se. It is often the case that more than one service have to be combined to produce the anticipated outcome, e.g. in the case of life-events. To this end, we propose an active, ontology-based blackboard architecture that aims at tackling the problems inherent in dynamic synthesis of composite Web services and at facilitating user interaction with complex e-government transactions.