Abstract. In the Semantic Web era, many techniques have been proposed to capture the explicit knowledge of a virtual community, and represent this knowledge in a structured form often referred to as domain ontology. One of the first steps of the ontology-building task is to collect a vocabulary of domain relevant terms. We designed a high-performing technique to automatically extract the shared terminology from available documents in a given domain. This technique has been successfully experimented and submitted for large-scale evaluation in the domain of enterprise interoperability, by the member of the INTEROP network of excellence. In order to make the technique available to the members of any web community, we developed a web application that allows users to acquire (incrementally or in a single step) a terminology in any domain, by submitting documents of variable length and format, and validate on-line the obtained results. The system also supports collaborative evaluation by a group of experts. The web application has been widely tested in several domains by many international institutions that volunteered for this task. 1

The automated planning community has traditionally focused on the efficient synthesis of plans given a complete domain theory. In the past several years, this line of work met with significant successes, and the future course of the community seems to be set on efficient planning with even richer models. While this line of research has its applications, there are also many domains and scenarios where the first bottleneck is getting the domain model at any level of completeness. In these scenarios, the modeling burden automatically renders the planning technology unusable. To counter this, I will motivate model-lite planning technology aimed at reducing the domain-modeling burden (possibly at the expense of reduced functionality), and outline the research challenges that need to be addressed to realize it.

The Web is moving from a collection of static documents to a collection of services. For realizing service interchange the service-oriented architecture together with the Web Services technology are widely seen as the most promising fundament. As a result, considerable attention has been given, both in research and in industry, to Web Services and related technologies. While a significant number of papers have already been published in the area of semantic Web Service discovery, most of them are more concerned with a logical framework rather than providing a contribution that meets existing practical realities. In this paper, we take a different approach: first we provide an empirical analysis of approaches towards Web Service discovery that are in use and then we describe our methodology that is derived from current actualities in the area of publicly available Web Services. Finally we present our Web Service Search Engine prototype. By employing automated methods to obtain rich service descriptions it provides high quality search results on top of the largest pool of Web Services known so far. 1

Context aware applications respond and adapt to changes in the computing environment. For example, they may react when the location of the user or the capabilities of the device used change. Despite the increasing importance and popularity of such applications, advances in application models to support their development have not kept up. Legacy application design models, which embed contextual dependencies in the form of if-then rules specifying how applications should react to context changes, are still widely used. Such models are impractical to accommodate the large variety of possibly even unanticipated context types and their values. This dissertation proposes a new application model for building context aware applications, considering them as dynamically composed sequences of calls to services, software components that perform well-defined computational operations and export open interfaces through which they can be invoked. This work employs goal-oriented inferencing from planning technologies for selecting the services and assembling the sequence of their execution, allowing different compositions

Abstract—Web services are considered to be a potential silver bullet for the envisioned Service Oriented Architecture, in which loosely coupled software components are published, located, and executed as integral parts of distributed applications. The main research focus of Web services is to achieve the interoperability between distributed and heterogeneous applications. Therefore, flexible composition of Web services to fulfill the given challenging requirements is one of the most important objectives in this research field. However, until now, service composition has been largely an error-prone and tedious process. Furthermore, as the number of available Web services increases, finding the right Web services to satisfy the given goal becomes intractable. In this paper, toward these issues, we propose an AI planning-based framework that enables the automatic composition of Web services, and explore the following issues. First, we formulate the Web service composition problem in terms of AI planning and network optimization problems to investigate its complexity in detail. Second, we analyze publicly available Web service sets using network analysis techniques. Third, we develop a novel Web service benchmark tool called WSBen. Fourth, we develop a novel AI planning-based heuristic Web service composition algorithm named WSPR. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to verify WSPR against state-of-the-art AI planners. It is our hope that both WSPR and WSBen will provide useful insights for researchers to develop Web service discovery and composition algorithms, and software.

Testing compositions of web services is complex, due to their distributed nature and asynchronous behaviour. However, research in this field is scarce. We propose a new testing method for compositions of web services. A formal verification tool (the SPIN model checker) will be used to automatically generate test suites for compositions specified in an industry standard language: BPEL. Adequacy criteria will be employed to define a systematic procedure to select the test cases. Preliminary results have been obtained using a transition coverage criterion. 1.

Generating test cases for compositions of web services is complex, due to their distributed nature and asynchronous behaviour. In this paper, a formal verification tool -- the SPIN model checker -- is used to generate test suite specifications for compositions specified in BPEL. A transition coverage criterion is employed to define a systematic procedure to select the test cases. The approach is applied to the "loan approval" sample composition.

Automated web service composition is one of the major promises of serviceoriented architecture, where services can be discovered and composed dynamically and automatically. To investigate the methods for composite web service construction, we conducted an experiment on creating useful composite web services from real existing web services where semantic annotations are not available. The empirical study reveals the difficulties and research challenges in the discovery, invocation, and composition of web services. The automation of web service composition requires the inputs from both services providers and service consumers. Service providers need to develop high quality services in a disciplined and collaborative way, and service consumers need to be equipped with tools providing helps such as service discovery and matching.

Abstract. A Business Process Management System (BPMS) supports business processes and organizations depend on its availability. Web services have been pointed as a suitable technology for BPMSs. Thus, the inclusion of fault tolerance in the Web service architecture is essential for process continuity. The goal of this paper is to propose a fault tolerant Web service architecture to be used with BPMSs. The architecture provides service mediation and monitoring, and uses Web service standards. The main contribution of this paper is an architecture to support fault tolerance for business processes based on Web services. 1.

Abstract. Web service technology offers facilities for business process automation. However, Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) demand additional facilities. For instance, there is no Quality of Service (QoS) management support in the current Web service model. The goal of this paper is to propose a policy-based Web service infrastructure, which offers autonomic service integration using QoS attributes. 1.