Towards Natural-like Requirement based Web Service Composition
Résumé
Most approaches for Web service composition focus on technical level as they specify “how-to-do” to achieve the composition by setting constraints on functional and non-functional properties instead of providing casual users with a natural-like means to express “what-to-do” to achieve their business objectives. This new mindset leads to extending Web services with the concept of capability, which describes what a Web service can actually do instead of its operations. The capability ultimately seeks to bridge the gap between Web services and business processes. Current capability modeling approaches, - the IOPE paradigm, WSDL semantic business annotations and action-verb clauses - fail to be expressive enough to capture user’s business objectives and efficiently support Web service discovery and composition with multiple constraints. In this paper, we propose a three-layer Web service capability model to capture business objectives, to specify actions that achieve objectives, and establish links between capabilities via a combination of semantic relationships. Based on this model, we present a natural language declarative description allowing users to express high-level business requirements based on the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), and a capability matching process that derives specific Web services and constraints for Web service composition.