Semantic Platform for building coherent net of smart services
Alexander Ivanovich Vodyaho, Nataly Alexandrovna Zhukova, Maxim Kolchin, Maxim Lapaev · REAL CORP Repository (University of Southampton) · 2016
Information infrastrucrure of modern cities has been developping incredibly fast over last decades. Improvement of all kinds of services has been impatiently demanded by end users in all domains who where forced to keep up-to-date not to lose ground in their spheres of interest. As a result, the majority of services used now are high-quality services that meet the extended requirements of end users. They can be definitely called smart services. The proplem is that there are a lot of services, but they are not compatible with each other. They can hardly be considered as elements of complicated business processes. It leads to creation of new services with duplicating functionality. Observed dynamics of service market development and its short term prediction clearly shows that in near future it will be impossible to satisfy all requests for new services and service infrastructure will become overheated. At the level of enterprises the problem is commonly solved by means of enterprise service bus, at the level of WWW – due to building and overall application of semantic web services. For the level of cities still there are no solutions that allow building complex logical structures based on existing services. The most obvious way for services integration is their unification. Even this simple solution is unimplementable for two reasons. First, it requires huge resources that depend on the total number of services. Second, it can affect the functionality of the services that is inadmissible for end users. So, one can say that at the level of the city integration solutions based on enterprise service bus are too light but Internet oriented solutions such as semantic web servises are too heavy. In this paper we propose a platform for agile service integration that allows linking services using semantic technologies. The platform does not generate additional requirements to services or imposes any restrictions. It supports linking services and, thus, building a net of services. Furthermore, it can reveal possible links between services that can enrich the service infrastructure. Sematic technologies form the base for integration platform. The services and their peculiar features are described in the platform ontology using OWL language. The OWL description of the services clarifies reasonable cases and ways for services usage. Similar approach is used for describing logic of complex services application. The processes of services interaction are defined in ontologies as well. For logic description BPEL is used.