Abstract

author) Abstract: In this paper we explore issues in the development of the my Grid ontology, which is an OWL ontology designed to support service discovery through service annotation. There are currently more than 3000 services offering programmatic access to bioinformatics resources. Composing these into workflows enables complex in silico experiments to be performed. These services, however, are highly distributed and heterogeneous, with inconsistent naming and descriptions, so service discovery and interpretation for the scientist is not only required, but also very difficult. my Grid offers middleware to support in silico experiments in the Life Sciences, enabling the design and enactment of workflows as well as components to assist service discovery for workflow composition. The my Grid ontology is one component in a larger semantic discovery framework. We describe this framework and the issues that led to its development. Practical experiences have demonstrated that successfully exploiting the ontology is dependent not only on the coverage of the domain and the mode of constructing service descriptions, but also on the complexity of the discovery and annotation tools that accompany it. Here we describe the my Grid ontology and the way the exploitation of it has changed and diversified during the project. From an initial model of formal OWL-DL semantics throughout, we now adopt a spectrum of expressivity and reasoning for different tasks in service annotation and discovery. Here we discuss the implications of this and our experiences in semantic service discovery.

Citations