What are Semantic Tools for Web Services?

Semantic Tools for Web Services is a set of Eclipse plug-ins that allow developers to insert into a WSDL document semantic annotations (references to concepts in a semantic model) that describe the semantics of the input, output, preconditions, and effects of service operations. The plug-in also matches the description of an annotated service against a set of available services looking for usable services or composition of services. This semantic matching and composition of Web services results in a set of weighted match results that can be examined by the developer. In order to assist in this task, this package includes a tool that allows the relationships between the requirements and the matched service to be analyzed and mediation work to begin.

This technology is part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), a special collection of emerging technologies from IBM's software development and research labs.

How does it work?

The mechanism for annotating Web services with semantics is based on an approach developed jointly by IBM (Joel Farrell and Rama Akkiraju), and the University of Georgia (Professor Amit Sheth and his team) as part of a technical note or specification (Web Services Semantics - WSDL-S). Semantic matching and composition of Web services is based on the algorithms developed by the IBM Research team using ontology-based inferencing and other semantic reasoning techniques. The ontologies are represented in Web Ontology Language (OWL), and inferencing is accomplished via the ABLE rule engine, a technology developed by Joe Bigus et al. of IBM Research and available here at alphaWorks. Semantic composition is accomplished using backward chaining and other AI planning algorithms.

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