An Ontology-Based Dynamic Service Composition Framework for Intelligent Houses

In order to improve users ability to interact with devices in an intelligent house, we propose a platform for intelligent device composition, based on Service Oriented Architecture. In such an environment, devices can be controlled and monitored using Service invocations, or they can interoperate in order to fulfil complex tasks, using Service composition. As part of our platform, we define a language for dynamic service composition, called MetaBPEL. It extends the WS-BPEL 2.0 language with semantic information, and acts as an abstract workflow definition mechanism. Unlike BPEL and other conventional composition languages, MetaBPEL does not bind to actual service implementations, but merely describes capabilities that services must have, in order to participate in a workflow. This feature allows both workflow migration between different environments as well as service replacement without modifying the composition scheme. In the article, we describe the MetaBPEL structure and the associated creation, generalization and instantiation mechanisms.