Abstract
Semantic
Service oriented architecture
SOA is loosely coupled architecture design to meet the business needs
of the organization. Loosely coupled means that the architecture
allows one to replace components or change components without having
to make reflective changes to other component in architecture. SOA
offers the ability for programs to find, invoke and interact with
each other in a dynamic fashion and on the fly.
A conventional process of using a SOA application includes three
steps: a Service Consumer defines the request for a service, the SOA
environment discovers and locate the interface of a qualified
service, and invokes the corresponding service implementation at the
Service Provider end. Thus, SOA permits and facilitates building of
enterprise level application, where modules/services may be
implemented and executed by uncoupled Service Providers.
However, one of the drawbacks of this mechanism of operation is that
service discovery, invocation and execution is completely syntax
based. This implies that identification of services registered in the
SOA environment is completely based on the textual description of the
service as defined by the service provider. Because of this, if a
service consumer looks for a service which is made available by a
name which is not known to the consumer, then the consumer may not be
able to access it. Hence there is an overgrowing need to build up
mechanisms which will permit the machines to process the descriptions
of the services and find the suitablility of the service as required
by a service consumer. This can be achieved through Semantic SOA.
For
the purpose of automated service discovery, the requests for services
must be composed in machine-processable format. Semantic SOA offers a
promising approach to overcome some of the shortages or loopholes of
today’s SOA technologies. It provide following enhancements:
1.
Information that contribute to the semantic description of Web
Services: Semantic description of services reprsented as
ontologies. Ontologies represent the data in a machine processable
form and allows reasoning and inferencing to be performed.
Ontological representation of the services would capture the critical
features of the service which describe its functionality for better
matching, These features include
input and output Parameters, capability conditions, non-functional
properties etc.
2.
Grounding of semantic descriptions relates the semantic
descriptions to schematic
description of services such as WSDL descriptions.
3.
Semantic registries to store the semantic information for service
consumers service matching functionalities using semantic based
search.
4. Semantic Web Services present ontological description of a
composed service as well as facilitating automatic composition of
services.
There have been some attempts made at establishing semantic SOA
environment. In this Mtech project, an attempt will be made to extend
and establish a Semantic SOA environment using existing open source
tools and softwares like WSMO, WSMX etc.
