Bringing Web Principles to Services: Ontology-Based Web Services

Researchers are beginning to realize the potential of web services that can use the web as a place for information publication and access as opposed to the traditional web services paradigm that merely uses the web as a transport medium. Traditional web services can be difficult to discover, can have complex invocation APIs, and require strong coupling between communicating applications. In previous work, the authors presented ontology-based techniques in which users make service requests using free-form, natural language-like specifications. This paper shows how the authors can use these ontological techniques to automatically create ontology-based web services that are easy for software agents to discover because they are created based on machine-processable formalisms (Ontologies), have invocation APIs requiring only simple read and write operations.