VFT: An Ontology-Based Tool for Visualization and Formalization of Web Service Composition

Web services provide an avenue of the loosely coupled service-oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software and other existing resources. To exploit the true potential of web services, it is vital to develop technologies and tools for web service composition. However, for most of end-users, due to the lack of the knowledge about web services, it is hard for them to understand the existing complex web service compositions and satisfy their demands based on such poor understanding. While numerous web service composition tools have been developed for professionals to study and compose web services in the past, very little has been done towards the tooling to facilitate the composition process for end-users. In this paper, we visualize the composition process of web services and formalize end-users’ demands via presenting an ontology-based tool VFT (Visualization and Formalization Tool) which is able to ease the process of web service composition for end-users by using their ontological descriptions and relationships to other services. We elaborate on the design of the tool and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.