Reasoning With Web Services

Web Services are widely seen as the most promising technology to enable interoperability among heterogeneous applications. However, current technologies only describe syntactical aspects of Web Services, providing a very limited automation support for the integration task. Semantic Web technologies are being applied to Web Services with the aim of offering a higher support for the automation of a number of tasks, significantly improving the quality of the integration tasks while drastically reducing its cost. The RW² project follows the direction of research that describes Web Services using semantic annotations. The main objectives are:

• A powerful and flexible suite of reasoning procedures capable of processing proof obligations in various service description languages of different expressive power and computational complexity (namely the Description Logics based languages WSML-Core and WSML-DL, the Horn Logics based extension of WSML-Core called WSML-RL and the First-order Logic extension of WSML-DL called WSML-FOL).
• A logic-based service discovery framework which allows agents to find suitable services based on a declarative specification of their needs as well as all other (non-logic based) elements used in the description of Web Services like Ontologies.
• A usable and fully-functional modelling environment for creating, editing and browsing semantic annotations of services, which will exploit the functionality provided by the other elements of the framework in order to support the human user in designing integration solutions quickly and economically.

RW² is a project founded by the Forschung, Innovation, Technologie - Informationstechnologie (FIT-IT) research programme in the programme line of "semantic systems and services". It has started January 2005 and has a planed duration of 30 month.