Exploiting UML and acceleo for developing Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web Services (SWS) purports to extend traditional Web services with semantic descriptions - leading to services that are machine processable and interpretable. To date, the implementation of semantic services has remained minute both in academia and industry. This is commonly attributed to barriers, such as the complex and heterogeneous semantic description languages, and a lack of mature methods and unified tools that aim to facilitate the development of such services. Moreover, the current solutions that assert to facilitate the development of semantic services are fragmented (i.e. developers are required to use a combination of disconnected tools to realize semantic services). This usually leads to a number of challenges, such as prolonged service development time. Furthermore, existing semantic service development platforms are tightly-coupled to specific semantic description languages, leading to restrictive development environments. This paper proposes a generic and unified approach for designing and developing semantic web services exploiting the Eclipse platform. The key is in using common techniques such as UML - for modelling a variety of semantic services' artefacts, and Acceleo - for automatic code generations of semantic services' artefacts. The main contributions in the proposed solution are: (1) support for the specification and generation of semantic services using multiple semantic description languages, (2) seamless modelling and development of services within a unified environment, and (3) minimization of the barriers associated with the development of semantic services through complexity hiding; decoupling; and extensibility.