Grounding and Execution of OWL-S Based Semantic Web Services

OWL-S is an ontology for specifying semantic web services written using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). In order to leverage the vast array of existing WSDL-based, non-semantic web services, OWL-S provides a grounding (or binding) mechanism that maps OWL ontological input and output concepts to the standard XML data types used in WSDL input and output messages. In this paper, we discuss an approach using the SPecification and EXecution tool (SPEX), that facilitates the automated generation of OWL-S groundings and associated XSLT transformations and also supports the execution of fully-grounded OWL-S-based semantic web services. In addition, we will present a comprehensive example that will demonstrate the use of the SPEX tool for the grounding and execution activities. This work is a follow-on to our previous work in the area of model-driven semantic web services and is the final piece in the end-to-end development approach.