With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, discovery of relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. One approach is to develop semantic Web services where by the Web services are annotated based on shared ontologies, and use these annotations for semantics-based discovery of relevant Web services. We discuss one such approach that involves adding semantics to WSDL using DAML+OIL ontologies. Our approach also uses UDDI to store these semantic annotations and search for Web services based on them. We compare our approach with another initiative to add semantics to support Web service discovery, and show how our approach may fit current standards-based industry approach better.

Trust is an important tool in human life, as it enables people to cope with the uncertainty caused by the free will of others. Uncertainty and uncontrollability are also issues in computer-assisted collaboration and electronic commerce in particular. A computational model of trust and its implementation can alleviate this problem. This survey

Web Services are software components that can be discovered and employed at runtime using the Internet. Conflicting requirements towards the nature of these services can be identified. From a business perspective, Web Services promise to enable the formation of ad-hoc cooperation's on a global scale. From a technical perspective, a high degree of standardization and rigorous specifications are required to enable the automated integration of Web Services. A suitable technology for Web Services has to mediate these needs for flexibility and stability. In this paper, a new approach to the description of Web Service semantics is introduced. It is a visual approach based on the use of software models and graph transformations and allows for the description of innovative services while providing a precise matching concept.

Abstract. We define a formal contract language along with subcontract and compliance relations. We then extrapolate contracts out of processes, that are a recursion-free fragment of ccs. We finally demonstrate that a client completes its interactions with a service provided the corresponding contracts comply. Our contract language may be used as a foundation of Web services technologies, such as wsdl and wscl. 1

Abstract. Choreographies offer means to capture global interactions between business processes of different partners. BPEL4Chor has been introduced to describe these interactions using BPEL. Currently, there are no formal methods available to verify BPEL4Chor choreographies. In this paper, we present how BPEL4Chor choreographies can be verified using Petri nets. A case study undermines that our verification techniques scale. Additionally, we show how the verification techniques can be used to generate a stub process for a partner taking part in a choreography. This is especially useful when the behavior of one participant is intended to follow the corresponding requirements of the other participants. Thus, the missing participant behavior can be generated and the error-prone design of that participant can be skipped.

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This thesis describes a system called the Transportation Security SensorNet that can be used to perform extensive cargo monitoring. It is built as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using open web service specifications and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. This allows for compatibility, interoperability and integration with other web services and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The two main capabilities that the Transportation Security SensorNet provides are remote sensor management and alarm notification. The architecture and the design of its components are described throughout this thesis. Furthermore, the specifications used and the fundamental ideas behind a Service Oriented Architecture are explained in detail. The system was evaluated in real world scenarios and performed as specified. The alarm notification performance throughout the system, from the initial detection at the Sensor Node service to the Alarm Reporting service, is on average 2.1 seconds. Location inquiries took 4.4 seconds on average. Note that the majority of the time, around 85% for most of the messages sent, is spent on the transmission of the message while the rest is used on processing inside the web services. Finally the lessons learned are discussed as well as directions for future enhancements to the Transportation Security SensorNet, in particular to security, complex management and asynchronous communication.

Abstract. The use of Web services as a means of dynamically discovering, negotiating, composing, executing and managing services to materialize enterprise-scale workflow is an active research topic. Existing approaches involve many disparate concepts, frameworks and technologies. What is needed is a comprehensive and overarching framework that handles the processing and workflow requirements of Virtual Organizations, maps them to a collection of service-oriented tasks, dynamically configures these tasks from available services, and manages the choreography and execution of these services. The goal is to add semantics to Web services to endow them with capabilities needed for their successful deployment in enterprise-scale systems for Virtual Organizations. This paper introduces such a framework, the Knowledge-based Dynamic Semantic Web Services (KDSWS) Framework that addresses in an integrated end-to-end manner, the life-cycle of activities involved in preparing, publishing, requesting, discovering, selecting, configuring, deploying, and delivering Semantic Web Services. In particular, the following issues are addressed with an emphasis on adaptability to rapidly changing environments and standards: 1) semantic specification of both service’s and requestor’s capabilities, constraints and preferences including quality of service, trust, and security; 2) transaction control and workflow management; and 3) resource management, interoperation and evolution of the Virtual Organization.

Abstract. In this article we interpret the Semantic Web and Web Service issues in the framework of multi-agent interoperating systems. We will advocate the application of results achieved in the research area of reasoning about actions and change by showing scenarios and techniques that could be applied. 1

Abstract. It is very important that any infrastructure for handling Semantic Web services be compatible with existing Web services whose description is already available through a corresponding Web service Description Language (WSDL) [8] document. In the case of the Web Services Execution Environment (WSMX) [9], only Web services having a valid semantic description expressed in terms of the Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) [11] and represented using the Web Services Modeling Language (WSML) [10] will be available for discovery, invocation or composition. This leads to the question of how to deal with Web services without such a description. There are two aspects to consider. The first is that the data model for WSDL services is defined in terms of XML Schema while the data model for Semantic Web services, in the context of WSMX, is defined conceptually by one or more WSMO ontologies and is expressed in WSML. The second aspect is how to map between the description of the public interface(s) and their physical bindings offered by a Web service as defined in WSDL and the corresponding descriptions offered by the description of the public behaviour of a Semantic Web service described in WSML. This paper describes early work in dealing with the first aspect mentioned. 1.