Exploiting Semantics for Analyzing and Verifying Business Rules in Web Services Composition and Contracting

Web services composition process needs business rules to regulate the behavior of the partner services. However, designing these rules is time-consuming and error-prone, especially under the condition that current standards barely provide any abstract and high-level guidance. In this spirit, rule analysis and verification for services composition is urgently required to augment its reliability and usability. In this paper, we choose a variant of Description Logics, called ALCO(Q*), as the underlying logic, and provide a formal mapping to transform ECA rules, so that the semantics in the original ECA rules can be captured and are computationally traceable. To this end, we further investigate some important properties for business rules, namely, redundancy, termination and conflict, and propose several sound and complete algorithms to resolve them.