Semantic Networks – Based Approach for Web Services Management

Hassina Nacer

and Taous Iggui

Computer Science Department, University of Science and Technology USTHB, Algiers, Algeria

Department of Computer Science, LIMED Laboratory, University of A. Mira, Bejaia, Algeria

Keywords: Services, Web Services Composition, Publication, Semantic Network.

Abstract: As commonly assumed in literature, Web services are software components of distributed applications

which provide services to other applications by using standard Internet technologies (XML, SOAP, WSDL,

UDDI). In this paper, we propose a novel semantic network-based approach for Web services management

in order to facilitate the Web services composition. For answering complex needs of users, the creation of a

composite Web service is required. The Web services composition is one of the big challenge problems of

recent years in a distributed and a dynamic environment. The proposed approach uses an inter-connected

network of semantic Web services describing in OWL-S, using the similarity measure (Outputs-Inputs

similarity) between concepts based on ontologies of domain, built before any submitted request.

Experimental results confirm that the proposed management approach reduces the complexity of the

composition task.

1 INTRODUCTION

Web services are more than distributed systems,

they provide the software foundation for next

generation organisations. To make Web services

accessible to users, service producers use Web

services registries to publish them. Among the

exponentially growing plethora of Web services, the

development of an infrastructure of Web services is

expected to change the business paradigm in the

Web because the current infrastructure of registries

is poor and the mechanism of Web services

composition is inefficient. The Web services

composition is a highly complex task. The proposed

standard (XML, WSDL, UDDI, SOAP) of Web

services technology do not answer the problems of

Web services composition by a software agent.

Furthermore, the semantic annotations for Web

services and requests are not yet mature. According

to (Nacer et al., 2009), the Web services

composition is useful as soon as a client’s request

cannot be satisfied by a single existing service but

by a composite Web service. This later is obtained

from a correct combination of several existing Web

services.

The purpose of this work is to propose an

approach of Web services management in order to

facilitate the Web service composition. This work

uses an ontology-based approach to organize the

UDDI into domains. We suggest, a semantic

network to publish the Web services in UDDI.

This paper is organized as follows. The section 2

covers research issues about Web services

management and composition. In section 3, we

introduce a semantic network as a knowledge

representation of several Web services. In the

section 4, Web services management is discussed as

an application of several semantic networks

merging, and a simple implementation is shown.

Finally in (section 5), we end with concluding

remarks and future works.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The Web services technology was concretized

around the specification of the W3C. It is divided

into three areas: (1) Communication Protocols

(SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol)

, (2)

Service Description (WSDL: Web Services

Description Language)

, and (3) Service Discovery

(UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and

Integration)

. These current standard revolve around

XML to achieve platform independence features.

Few researches have been done in the area of Web

Is a protocol to exchange structured information in a

decentralized and distributed environment

It describes only the syntactic interface of Web services

Is a virtual registry that exposes information about Web

services

Nacer, H. and Iggui, T.

Semantic Networks – Based Approach for Web Services Management.

DOI: 10.5220/0005976100950099

In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2016) - Volume 2: ICSOFT-PT, pages 95-99

ISBN: 978-989-758-194-6

services management. According to (Yu et al.,

2008), Web services management refers to the

control and monitoring of Web services qualities and

usage. Web services management mechanisms are

coupled with the QoS

. The authors identify two

types of management: control

and monitoring

OASIS proposed the Web services distributed

management specification that addresses the

management of IT resources by defining Web

services interfaces and the management of Web

services by defining messages. A Web service

description can be published to multiple service

registries using a variety of mechanisms. These

various mechanisms provide different capabilities

depending on how dynamic the publications using

the service is intended to be. Like all Internet based

computer applications, composition Web services is

one of the most common concerns for

interoperability (Nacer and Aissani, 2014). There

have been several research efforts on Web services

composition. We surveyed Web services

composition development literature from these last

years. Many industry standards have been

developed. Furthermore, many academic research

activities have also been resolved by various models;

Petri Nets (Chemaa et al., 2015), Logical

Programming (Zhai et al., 2015), Markov Process

(Cetina et al., 2015) Matching Algorithm or

Chaining (Ara et al., 2014), AI Planning (Remli et

al., 2015), Graphs (Chao, 2010), Semantic Network

(Nacer et al., 2009), States Machine or Finite States

Automaton (Nagamouttou et al., 2015), Workflow

techniques (Zou et al., 2014), Genetic Algorithms

(Michael and Gero, 2007) (Canfora et al, 2005), and

KP (Tao and Jay, 2005) (Mallayya et al., 2015), etc.

3 USING SEMANTIC NETWORK

AS KNOWLEDGE

REPRESENTATION

3.1 A Semantic Network

Semantic networks are widely used to represent

knowledge, they are a specific class of graphs,

characterized by a huge number of nodes. They are

used in many different fields to model real-word

systems. Semantic networks are consist of nodes and

Quality of a Service

It aims to improve the service quality through a set of control

mechanisms

It rates the behavior of Web services in delivering its

functionalities in terms of quality

and arcs. A node Ni represents the semantic Web

service and a relation defines an arc from the node

Ni to the other node Nj with a label L. This later

indicates the similarity measure between the two

nodes. Furthermore, a set of nodes, labels, and arcs

represents a knowledge as a semantic network. A

knowledge K

is given by the following equation:

= {{N

,…N

}, {L

, L

,…L

}

∪

→

(1)

Where k

is the number of nodes, l is a number of

labels. A tuple with a set of nodes, a set of labels,

and a set of edges makes knowledge in semantic

network.

3.2 Merging Several Semantic

Networks

It is possible to link sets of knowledge represented in

several semantic networks by using a sharing

operation. As in (Kuwata and Yatsu, 1997), we use

the merging operation. Given n knowledge sets k

, …k

, we can built a global knowledge by adding

labels and edges. This is represented by the

following equations :

= {{N

, N

,…N

}, {L

, L

,…L

}

∪

→ j}

(2.1)

= {{N

, N

,…N

}, {L

, L

,…L

}

∪

→ j}

(2.2)

= {{N

, N

,…N

}, {L

, L

,…L

}

∪

→ j}

(2.n)

Produce the following new knowledge set as k

∪k

2

∪...∪k

n

∪ k

={{{N

, N

, ..., N

} ∪ {N

, N

, ..., N

}

∪{N

, N

, ..., N

}} ∪ {{L

, L

, ..., L

} ∪ {L

, L

..., L

} ∪{L

, L

, ..., L

}} ∪ {R

→ j }}

The Figure 1 is an example of merging tree

knowledge.

Figure 1: An example of merging semantic network as a

new knowledge.

ICSOFT-PT 2016 - 11th International Conference on Software Paradigm Trends

4 WEB SERVICES

PUBLICATION AND

MANAGEMENT

Two dimensions are required for publishing and

managing Web services in order to facilitate the

Web services composition. The two dimensions are

defined as following:

 Space: This dimension refers to the space

memory reserved for Web services’ publication

in UDDI:

1. Construction of sub registers of Web services

description.

2. Criteria of classification: Domain’s Web

service application.

3. Storage of sub registers in UDDI.

4. Exploitation of sub registers in Web services

composition.

 Structure: This dimension refers to the

organization of Web services in UDDI by using

semantic networks:

1. Semantic network:

- Node: Name of service

- Arc: Semantic relation between two services

(It means the similarity between the Output

of a service and the Input of the following

service)

- Label: Similarity Measure between two

services

2. Measurements of similarity:

- Match: The two concepts are equivalent.

- Subsume: A concept is more general than

another.

- PlugIn: A concept is included in another.

The semantic Web services in UDDI have to be

recorded in a registry in the form of a semantic

network before any submitted request. Each node

represents a semantic Web service and an arc is

labeled by a value which represents a similarity

measure between the output of the service and the

input of the following service. The space’s criterion

provides the first hierarchical classification of Web

services on the basis of work’s activity related to an

ontology of domain. In addition, to refine this

classification, and to reduce the complexity of Web

services composition, it is necessary to refine sub

registers of Web services by specifying the structure.

Furthermore, we can define interconnections

between different Web services of each sub registry

by using concepts and relations based on the model

of a semantic network. Thus, it is very important to

organize semantic Web services in groups, each

group represents a knowledge. We applied the

merging operation on the set of groups. To validate

our proposed approach, we implemented a prototype

in Java.

Let 16 real semantic Web services be in a local

registry without the QoS criteria, the following

Table 1 shows the local registry. The URIs of

services used in the example begin with:

www.mindswap.org/2004/owls/1.1/ (Site, 2009b).

Example: For the service which sid=0, the URI is

www.mindswap.org/2004/owls/1.1/ZipCodeDistanc

e.owl

Table 1: UDDI: Directory of Services.

Sid Sname Inputs Out-puts

Link to

ontology

zipCode-

Distance

zipcode1

zipcode2

Dist-ance

ZipCode-

Distance.owl

1 FindZip-Code City, state Zip-code

ZipCode-

Finder.owl

zipCode-

Forecasts

lat/long,

temp

forcast

ZipCodeFor-

ecasts.owl

EnglishDic-

tion nary

string,

string

Dictiona-

ry.owl

4 BabelFish

string,

string

Lan-guage

BabelFishTr

anslator.owl

GetTemperatu

Zipcode temp

GetTempe-

rature.owl

Google

Business

what,

addres

url

GoogleBusi-

nesses.owl

7 ZipCode-info Zipcode info

ZipCode-

info.owl

Google

Direction

addres1

addres2

url

GoogleDirecti

on.owl

Currency-

Converter

price,

currency

price

Currency-

Converter.owl

Bn Price

Check

Book-info

Book-

price

BNPrice.owl

11 GetPres-sure

lat/long,

coast

geo

GetPressurE.o

12 Book Price

Bookname,

currency

Book-price

BookPrice.ow

13 Book Finder Bookname Bookinfo

BookFinder.o

14 FindLat-Long zipcode lat/ long

FindlatLong.o

15 Display-Url url info

Display-

URL.ow

 Step 1: Classification based on domain of

activity

An example of a sub registry is illustrated in the

Table 2, which is extracted from the previous Table

 Step 2: Refinement

An example of a semantic network built from the

information of the previous Table 2 is shown in the

Figure 2.

Semantic Networks – Based Approach for Web Services Management

Table 2: Example 1: Sub registry.

Sid Sname Inputs Out-puts

Link to

ontology

zipCode-

Distance

zipcode1

zipcode2

Dis-tance

ZipCode-

Distance.owl

1 FindZip-Code City, state Zip-code

ZipCode-

Finder.owl

zipCode-

Forecasts

lat/long,

temp

forcast

ZipCode-

Forecasts. owl

GetTem-

perature

Zipcode temp

GetTempe-

rature.owl

7 ZipCo-deinfo Zipcode info

ZipCode-

info.owl

11 GetPres-sure

lat/long,

coast

geo

GetPres-

surE.owl

14 FindLat Long Zipcode lat/ long

Findlat-

Long.owl

Figure 2: Knowledge 1: An example of a sub semantic

network of Web services.

 Step 3: Merging

All semantic networks in UDDI is regarded as a

group knowledge coming from the merging of the

several knowledge. Knowledge

, Knowledge

, ...

Knowledge

5 CONCLUSIONS

Despite the importance of Web service composition,

management and publication of Web services have

not been extensively investigated. In this paper we

have discussed the management requirements of

semantic Web services. As a contribution to this

important concern, we have proposed an approach to

managing Web services according to the semantic

requirements of Web services and the concepts of

semantic network and the merging operation.

However, we are also planning to do other

experiments I order to find the best knowledge

representation for publishing and managing semantic

Web services in UDDI.

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Semantic Networks – Based Approach for Web Services Management