TRANSFORMATION OF ALGEBRAIC SPECIFICATIONS INTO ONTOLOGICAL SEMANTIC DESCRIPTIONS OF WEB SERVICES
Dongmei Liu, Hong Ping Zhu, Ian Bayley · Services Transactions on Services Computing · 2014
The accurate description of service semantics plays a crucial role in service discovery, composition and interaction. Most work in this area has been focused on ontological descriptions, which are searchable and machineunderstandable. However, they do not define service functionality in a verifiable and testable manner In contrast, formal specification techniques, having evolved over the past 30 years, can define semantics in such a manner, but they have not yet been widely applied to service computing because the specifications produced are not searchable. There is a huge gap between these two methods of semantics description. This paper bridges the gap by advancing a transformation technique. It specifies services formally in an algebraic specification language, and then, extracts an ontological description of domain knowledge and service semantics as profiles in an ontology description language such as OWL-S. This brings the desired searchability benefits. The paper presents a prototype tool for performing this transformation and reports a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.