An Approach for Visualization and Formalization of Web Service Composition

Web services provide a complete new way of the loosely coupled service-oriented architecture and facilitate the process of application integration by encapsulating information and existing softwares. To exploit the true potential of Web services, it is vital to develop methodologies and tools for automatic Web service composition. Numerous Web service composition description languages have been developed for professionals to study and compose web services in the past. However, current Web service composition description languages like OWL-S, WSMO and METEOR-S still have many limitations such as the lack of elements to describe dynamic transformations among components of Web service compositions. In this paper, we propose a fast Web service composition approach (FWSCA) which adopts the extended OWL-S Web service semantic description language (OWL-ES). OWL-ES is able to describe dynamic transformations among components of Web service compositions by extending the existing process model of OWL-S. We elaborate on the design of FWSCA and discuss its usability by using an example of Web service composition. For the tooling part of FWSCA, we develop an automatic Web service composition visualization and formalization tool (VFT) which is able to ease the process of Web service composition for end-users.