Web Service Composition Plans in OWL-S

E. Ziaka, D. Vrakas, N. Bassiliades, “Web Service Composition Plans in OWL-S”, Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), J. Filipe and A. Fred (Eds.), Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Vol. 271, pp. 240-254, 2013.

One of the main visions of Semantic Web has been the ability of software agents to compose atomic web services in order to facilitate the automation of complex tasks. One of the approaches used in the past in order to automatically construct composite web services has been AI planning. The most important advantage of this approach is its dynamic character that reduces the interference of the user. Although there have been various attempts to utilize planning algorithms and systems in the composition process, there has been little work in the field of converting web service composition plans in OWL-S. This paper studies the use of two well established standards in expressing plans and composite web services, namely the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) and the Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S) and suggests a method for translating the produced PDDL plans of any planning system to OWL-S descriptions of the final composite web services. The result is a totally new web service that can later be discovered and invoked or even take part in a new composition.