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Composing Web services on the Semantic Web

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Abstract.

Service composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in tomorrow’s Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government. To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc, time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services to determine whether two services are composable. We provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 7054 Haycock Road, VA 22043, Falls Church, USA

    Brahim Medjahed & Athman Bouguettaya

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, 250 N. University Street, IN 47907, West Lafayette, USA

    Ahmed K. Elmagarmid

Authors
  1. Brahim Medjahed
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  2. Athman Bouguettaya
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  3. Ahmed K. Elmagarmid
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brahim Medjahed.

Additional information

Received: 15 December 2002, Accepted: 16 April 2003, Published online: 23 September 2003

Athman Bouguettaya: This author’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government Program under grant 9983249-EIA and by a grant from the Commonwealth Information Security Center (CISC).

Ahmed K. Elmagarmid: This author’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government Program under grant 9983249-EIA.

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Medjahed, B., Bouguettaya, A. & Elmagarmid, A.K. Composing Web services on the Semantic Web. VLDB 12, 333–351 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-003-0101-5

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