Development of semantic web services: model driven approach

The power of Web Service (WS) technology lies in the fact that it establishes a common, vendor-neutral platform for integrating distributed computing applications, in intranets as well as the Internet at large. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) promise to provide solutions to the challenges associated with automated discovery, dynamic composition, enactment, and other tasks associated with managing and using service-based systems. One of the barriers to a wider adoption of SWS technology is the lack of tools for creating SWS specifications. OWL-S is one of the major SWS description languages. This paper presents a model driven approach to facilitate the construction of OWL-S specifications. The methodology is divided into three main steps. In the first step we reverse engineered WSDL documents into UML profile models that enable the use of high-level graphical models as an integration platform for semantic web services. In the second step, suitable domain ontologies are used for the semantic annotation of the UML models. Finally, in the third step a conversion tool will generate automatically the OWL-S description from these UML models. The UML profile provides flexibility as it can expresses multiple semantic web service concepts.