Service Configuration Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Based on a Hybrid Approach

To respond to diverse customer needs, services are customized and committed to certain configuration in a paradigm similar with product mass customization. In order to achieve efficient and effective service configuration in a sharable and reusable way, a hybrid approach based on ontologies and rules for representing and reasoning service configuration knowledge is presented in this paper. Structural knowledge is represented by ontology and formalized by OWL, resulting in well-defined semantics. In addition, rule knowledge is represented in SWRL, a rule language based on OWL. Actual configuration reasoning is thus implemented using JESS, a rule engine for the Java platform, based on knowledge base formed by SWRL and OWL. The proposed approach is finally illustrated with a case study for configuring a specific service called Care Pack.