A Minimalist Approach to Semantic Annotations for Web Processes Compositions

In this paper we propose a new approach to the automated composition of distributed processes described as semantic web services. Current approaches, such as those based on owl-s and wsmo, in spite of their expressive power, are hard to use in practice. Indeed, they require comprehensive and usually large ontological descriptions of the processes, and rather complex (and often inefficient) reasoning mechanisms. In our approach, we reduce to the minimum the usage of ontological descriptions of processes, so that we can perform a limited, but efficient and useful, semantic reasoning for composing web services. The key idea is to keep separate the procedural and the ontological descriptions, and to link them through semantic annotations. We define the formal framework, and propose a technique that can exploit simple reasoning mechanisms at the ontological level, integrated with effective reasoning mechanisms devised for procedural descriptions of web services. This work is partially funded by the European project FP6-507482 “Knowledge Web” , by the MIUR-FIRB project RBNE0195K5, “Knowledge Level Automated Software Engineering”, and by the MIUR-PRIN 2004 project “Advanced Artificial Intelligence Systems for Web Services”.