The Semantic Representation of WSPL in OWL-DL

Abstract

With the wide application of Web services, people now pay more attention to the non-functional properties of Web services such as quality of service (QoS), security, etc. in discovery and selection. As a Web services policy language, Web Services Policy Language (WSPL) is widely used for expressing non-functional properties of Web services. However, this proposed language is based on XML schema, which is relatively inexpressive and suffers from a lack of formal semantics. In this paper, we provide a semantic representation of WSPL in the description logic fragment species of the Web Ontology Language (OWL-DL). OWL-DL will provide the semantic support for the policy description of WSPL, and enhance the expressivity and computability of the policy language. By representing WSPL policies as OWL-DL complex classes that are built up through OWL-DL class expressions, the most standard OWL-DL reasoners can be used to check policy conformance and perform an array of policy analysis tasks through TBox reasoning.