Mobilizing the semantic web with DAML-enabled web services

Abstract

The Web is evolving from a repository for text and images to a provider of services - both information-providing services, and services that have some effect on the world. Today's Web was designed primarily for human use. To enable reliable, large-scale automated interoperation of services by computer programs or agents, the properties, capabilities, interfaces and effects of Web services must be understandable to computers. In this paper we propose a vision and a partial realization of precisely this. We propose markup of Web services in the DAML family of semantic Web markup languages. Our markup of Web services enables a wide variety of agent technologies for automated Web service discovery, execution, composition and interoperation. We present one logic-based agent technology for service composition, predicated on the use of reusable, task-specific, high-level generic procedures and user-specific customizing constraints.