The Trip Planner: Exploring an Ontology-Based Web Service Composition and Brokering Framework

• Main Authors: Po-Chun Chen, 陳柏均
• Other Authors: Yih-Kuen Tsay
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/41318722534959724126

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊管理學研究所 === 92 === Web services have emerged as a key technology for distributed systems development and integration. Thanks to their standard XML-based interfaces, simpler Web services may be readily composed to provide integrated services that meet varying user requirements. Each Web service has its own specific functionalities and therefore the constituent services of an integrated service have to be prescribed and targeted precisely. As the number and variety of Web services continue to grow, it will be challenging to find the needed Web services and compose them automatically. To address this challenge, we propose a framework for Web service composition and brokering. The main ingredient of the framework is a service composition and brokering system architecture, which consists of four main components: the Service Collector/Annotator, the Service Composer, the Inference Engine, and the Execution Engine. These four components share a set of ontologies, which are used not only to add extra information on Web services but also to provide a common vocabulary for communication among the components. To illustrate the application of this framework, we develop a prototype system for trip planning. The prototype is implemented as an application on top of the well-used knowledge base system Protege, while the underlying ontologies are defined in OWL.