The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is to enable automated collaboration over the Internet, based on ontologies as semantic terminology definitions and Web Services as computational facilities accessible over the Web. An essential functionality for collaboration support on the Semantic Web is detection of entities, services, and other resources that are to be used for achieving a successful collaboration. This is commonly referred to as discovery, wherefore the emerging concept of Semantic Web Services promises more effective support than conventional Web Service technologies: based on exhaustive semantic description frameworks, intelligent mechanisms are envisioned for discovery, composition, and contracting of Web Services. This paper outlines an approach for automated collaboration support using Semantic Web Services, and presents the realization of semantically driven discovery of cooperation partners and usable Web Services as a main component for collaboration establishment. 1.

Abstract. In this paper, we present a model of agents which use argumentation to select and compose services in open and distributed environments. For this purpose, we propose a modular agent architecture using three main modules, dedicated, respectively, to decision making, communication, and negotiation. We deploy a simple “virtual ” travel agent example to illustrate how our agents select and compose services, focusing on the functionalities of the modules within the agents. 1

Abstract. Business Process Analysis (BPA) aims at monitoring, diagnosing, simulating and mining enacted processes in order to support the analysis and enhancement of process models. An effective BPA solution must provide the means for analysing existing e-businesses at three levels of abstraction: the Business Level, the Process Level and the IT Level. BPA requires semantic information that spans these layers of abstraction and which should be easily retrieved from audit trails. To cater for this, we describe the Process Mining Ontology and the Events Ontology which aim to support the analysis of enacted processes at different levels of abstraction spanning from fine grain technical details to coarse grain aspects at the Business Level. 1

Abstract. The analysis of investment funds information requires the availability of homogeneous, both up-to-date and historical information of the funds considered, which is usually generated and provisioned by different parties and in heterogeneous formats. In this context, the gathering and integration of information from disparate, heterogeneous sources becomes a key task that can be considerably eased by the availability of explicit and shared information models. Furthermore, the analysis process leads to the generation of analytic, added-value information, whose consumption by other parties can also benefit from the existence of agreed information models. In this paper, we present our work on building explicit information models for investment funds in the Spanish market. In particular, we present an XBRL taxonomy for investment funds and a generic translation process of XBRL taxonomies into OWL ontologies that has been applied to the investment funds taxonomy in order to obtain an OWL ontology of funds. Furthermore, we discuss the relative benefits of using OWL ontologies or XBRL taxonomies for the exchange and analysis of investment funds information. 1

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are becoming widespread solutions for realizing distributed applications. They promote a service view of the world in which functionalities exposed as services by different companies are assembled and reused in a standardized manner. Services are the core building blocks of SOAs and therefore modeling various aspects of services becomes a fundamental challenge. Among these aspects, quality-of-service (QoS) need to be addressed given the high dynamism of any SOA-based system. This paper introduces the basic steps of modeling QoS characteristics of services with the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) in order to provide a QoS-aware SOA. It discusses the current limitations of modeling QoS characteristics with WSMO and proposes a set of approaches towards a richer QoS modeling support. Each approach is analyzed in terms of complexity and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are discussed.

Abstract. This paper presents an approach for automating semantic annotation within service-oriented architectures that provide interfaces to databases of spatial-information objects. The automation of the annotation process facilitates the transition from the current state-of-the-art architectures towards semantically-enabled architectures. We see the annotation process as the task of matching an arbitrary word or term with the most appropriate concept in the domain ontology. The term matching techniques that we present are based on text mining. To determine the similarity between two terms, we first associate a set of documents [that we obtain from a Web search engine] with each term. We then transform the documents into feature vectors and thus transition the similarity assessment into the feature space. After that, we compute the similarity by training a classifier to distinguish between ontology concepts. Apart from text mining approaches, we also present two alternative techniques, namely hypothesis checking (i.e. using linguistic patterns such as “term 1 is a term 2 ” as a query to a search engine) and Google Distance.

This paper proposes a model-driven methodology to design and develop semantic Web service applications and their components, described according to the emerging WSMO standard. In particular, we show that business processes and Web engineering models have sufficient expressive power to support the semi-automatic extraction of semantic descriptions (i.e., WSMO ontologies, goals, Web services, and mediators), thus partially hiding the complexity of dealing with semantics. Our method is based on existing models for the specification of business processes (BPMN) combined with Web engineering models for designing and developing semantically rich Web applications (WebML). The proposed approach leads from an abstract view of the business needs to a concrete implementation of the application, by means of several design steps; high level models are transformed into software components. Our framework increases the efficiency of the whole design process, yielding to the construction of semantic Web service applications spanning over several enterprises.

Abstract. Web service discovery given a user request becomes a fundamental challenge in a service-oriented world. The overall success of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) however will very much depend on automatic and accurate solutions for the discovery problem. Furthermore such solutions need to be efficiently integrated with other service related tasks (e.g. service composition). In this paper we propose a logic based approach for service discovery with composition support. First, we provide a formal model for service discovery based on semantic description of services and then we show how such approach can be integrated with service composition. Furthermore we provide a prototype implementation that validates our theoretical solution. 1

Abstract. The introduction of service-orientation leads to significant improvements regarding flexibility in the choice of business partners and IT-systems. This requires an increased adaptability of enterprise software landscapes as the environment is more dynamic than the ones in traditional approaches. In this paper we present different types of adaptation scenarios for service compositions and their implementation in a service provision platform. Based on experiences from the Adaptive Services Grid (ASG) project, we show how dynamic adaptation strategies are able to support an automated selection, composition and binding of services during run-time.

This thesis explains what unit testing is and why unit testing for ontologies is a helpful process for an ontological engineer in order to verify an ontology. In the course of that we clarify what an ontology is and present some common methodologies for ontological engineering. In a first step we define exactly in which state of the development process unit testing can be helpful. Unit testing is highly dependent on the used logical language, which is underlying the used ontology language. Therefore, in a second step, we examine some logical languages and detail those cases where the use of unit testing makes sense in order to avoid engineering mistakes. The theoretical results of this thesis are used to implement a unit testing prototype for WSML-Flight and WSML-Rule ontologies, based on Eclipse. Acknowledgements First, I thank my advisor Holger Lausen. He tought me how to write a thesis and guided me into the right direction. Furthermore, I would like to thank