A method to integrate business registries by using OWL-S ontologies

Abstract

WWW is currently undergoing a remarkable change from a collection of pages to a collection of services that interoperate through the Internet. The most successful types of these services are XML Web services and ebXML, which are emerging as significant e-Business application frameworks. However, both ebXML and Web services use different registries each other for the purpose of publishing and discovering services. And this discrepancy of registries has given rise to a demand for integrated query when adopting the frameworks. Furthermore, these registries support only keyword-based search, which does not make use of semantic information, and which does not address the problem of matching service capabilities and allowing service location based on the functionalities sought. In the literature of semantic Web, the problem of creating ontologies from legacy information has been also arisen. In this paper, we show how service descriptions, written in OWL-S, can be mapped into UDDI and ebXML registry entries, and can be migrated from registries. Therefore, it provides not only a way to support integrated queries for registry entries but also a way to build a foundation of semantic service discovery. Also, migrated OWL-S can be updated periodically while registry entries are being modified by using replication APIs of the registries.