Invited talk: towards declarative programming for web services

• Authors: Sheila A. McIlraith
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
• Year: 2004

Two trends are emerging in the World Wide Web (WWW). The first is the proliferation of Web Services -- self-contained, Web-accessible software applications and associated distributed systems architectures. The second is the emergence of the "Semantic Web," the vision for a next-generation WWW that is computer interpretable. Today's Web was designed primarily for human use. To enable reliable, large-scale automated interoperation of Web services, their properties and capabilities must be understandable to a computer program. In this talk we briefy overview our ongoing work to develop a declarative language for describing Web services on the Semantic Web, contrasting it with emerging industrial Web service and Semantic Web standards. Our declarative representation of Web services enables automation of a wide variety of tasks including Web service discovery, invocation, interoperation, composition, simulation, verification and monitoring.To address the problem of automated Web service composition, we propose automated reasoning techniques based on the notion of generic procedures and customizing user constraint. To this end, we adapt and extend a logic programming language to enable programs that are generic, customizable and usable in the context of the Web. We combine these with deductive synthesis techniques to generate compositions of Web services. Further, we propose logical criteria for these generic procedures that define when they are knowledge self-sufficient and physically self-sufficient. To support information gathering combined with search, we propose a middle-ground interpreter that operates under an assumption of reasonable persistence of key information. Our implemented prototype system is currently interacting with services on the Web.Parts of this work were done in collaboration with Tran Cao Son and Honglei Zeng. The notion of semantic Web services is introduced in [3]. The origins of OWL-S, the OWL (Ontology Web Language) ontology for Web services are described as DAML-S in [1]. Up-to-date work on OWL-S can be found at [5]. Research on automated Web service composition can be found in [3, 2], with research on analysis, simulation and verification of Web services discussed in [4].