A Framework to Improve Semantic Web Services Discovery and Integration in an E-Gov Knowledge Network

Denilson Sell1, Liliana Cabral2, Alexandre Gonalves1 Enrico Motta2 and Roberto Pacheco1
1 Grupo

Stela, UFSC, Lauro Linhares 2123, Bloco B, 2. andar Florianpolis, 88036-002, Brazil {denilson, alexl, pacheco}@stela.ufsc.br http://www.stela.ufsc.br 2 Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK {l.s.cabral, e.motta}@open.ac.uk http://www.kmi.open.ac.uk

Abstract. One of the major challenges in Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology is the improvement of the services matching process. This challenge is a critical issue to promote systems interoperability in the context of Scienti Network (SN), an international knowledge network in Science & Technology (S&T) [1]. We have been working on a framework to tackle this problem in the context of IRS-II SWS infrastructure. This framework (SeGOV), comprehends a set of ontologies to describe services in functional layers in order to allow their matching and improve their capabilities. A considerable advance in services interoperability was obtained with the SWS advent. However, in the context of SN, SWS matching is still a challenge. In addition to the number of services (several hundreds), many of these services have similar descriptions despite accomplishing different tasks. We have been working on a framework (SeGOV) to extend the IRS-II Task and PSM descriptions [2] contextualizing SWS capabilities according to main functionalities found in SN in order to improve the matching process. In SeGOV, SWS are described in three Service Layers: Transactional (describes operational services that perform support transactions such as data maintenance, login validation, etc), Presentation (describes the presentation instruments, such as portal functionalities, and how the data should be transformed to be displayed to users) and Knowledge (knowledge discovery applications). Each layer is described by an ontology written in OCML [2] comprehending the main operations found in SN and the relationships between SWS. In addition, SeGOV comprehends three Context Layers, the Domain Concepts (description of concepts related to the S&T domain), the Data Sources (describes how the data is organized and stored to support maintenance and retrieval operations) and the Information Units (syntactic representation of the information units to support the exchange of messages and SWS grounding). In the Fig. 1, we present a simplified description of the task Find_Braz_CV_Task and its relationships with several concepts distributed in the SeGOV layers. The rela-

tions between the concepts and this task support its matching according to its capabilities in a semi-automatic way similar to [3]. The relations with the Context Layers aim to support the matching according to the data manipulated by this task.
SearchCV isA Find_Braz CV_Task tackles Find_CV isA

isA

subTask Check Synonym

Knowledge

Task finds hasInput

PSM isA hasGrounding Grounding

Service Layers

Presentation Transactional Domain Concepts

Term

tackles Extend Concept hasOutput

CV summarizes

Identification hasXSD isA CV Vec Table stores EN_RH isA

Context Layers

Data Sources Information Units

Context Vector CV Group Institution isA

CV XSD

Find_Braz CV_Ground

Fig. 1. Brief illustration of SWS description in SeGOV layers

We have been extending the user-guided composition process described in [3], by enabling the user to inform search arguments and presenting the list of related services, contextualizing the relationships between the data sources in which the arguments were found and the services related to each data source. Both Service and Context Layers have been designed to support the improvement of the services capabilities as well. In addition, we are researching how to capture information about the context of users interactions with SN in order to suggest services related to these interactions. Details about SeGOV ontologies and the improvement of SWS capabilities and matching process will be given in further papers.

Acknowledgements
This research is funded by CNPq, Brazil, and supported by KMi (Open University).

References
1. 2. 3. Pacheco, R. C. S.: Rede SCienti. In: VI Congreso Regional de Informacin in Ciencias de la Salud. Puebla. (2003) Motta E., Domingue J., Cabral L., Gaspari M.: IRS-II: A Framework and Infrastructure for Semantic Web Services. In: Proceedings of 2nd. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003), Florida, USA. (2003). Sirin E., Hendler J., Parsia B.: Semi-automatic composition of web services using semantic descriptions. In: Web Services Workshop in Conjunction with ICEIS. (2003).