An Ontology-Based Method for Rendering Execution Results of Dynamically Invoked Web Services

Abstract

Web services technology is mainly designed for the interoperability among machines, whose inputs and outputs are defined in the form of XML schema without presentation information, hence it is unable to present the execution results of Web services to human beings directly and friendly. To address this problem, an ontology-based method and a rendering engine are proposed in this paper. In the method, domain ontology is utilized to annotate the types of inputs and outputs of a Web service. Templates are generated and stored according to each type described in the ontology. When rendering, the rendering engine first finds out the type of the execution results, and then retrieves corresponding templates with the URL of the type, finally recursively renders the execution results with the templates. In addition, a management interface is proposed for managing the templates.