(lambert-hfsddm-2007.pdf)
Abstract. Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users' informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique—using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues—can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies.

Abstract. Current problems in Business Process Management consist of terminology mismatches and unstructured and isolated knowledge representation in process models. Semantic Business Process Management aims at overcoming many of those weaknesses of Business Processes Management through the use of explicit semantic descriptions of process artifacts. However, this vision has a prerequisite: semantic annotations need to be added to the process models. In this paper we present an approach that allows flexibly annotating semantics in a user-friendly way, by exposing ontological knowledge to the business user in appropriate forms and by employing matchmaking and filtering techniques to display options with high relevance only. By adding semantic information the precision of process models increases, ultimately supportingWeb Service discovery and composition. As a proof-of-concept, the work has been implemented prototypically in a process modeling tool.

Abstract. In order to make accessible new Semantic Web Services technologies to the end users, the level of tools supporting these technologies should be significantly raised. The paper presents such a tool—an INFRAWBS Designer—a graphical ontology-driven development environment for creating a semantic description of Web services and goals according to WSMO Framework. The tool is oriented to the end users—providers of Web services and semantic Web services applications, who would like to convert their services into WSMO based semantic Web services. The most character features of the tool—intensive use of ontologies, automatic generation of logical description of a semantic service from graphical models and the use of similarity-based reasoning for finding similar service descriptions to be reused as initial templates for designing new services are discussed.

(wiseWorkshop2007.pdf)
Abstract. Web service search is an important problem in service oriented architecture that has attracted widespread attention from academia as well as industry. Web service searching can be performed by various stakeholders, in different situations, using different forms of queries. All those combinations result in radically different ways of implementation. Using a real web service composition example, this paper describes when, what, and how to search web services from service assemblers' point of view.

(sdc-visualization-final.pdf)
Abstract. We present a goal-based graphical user interface for visualizing and browsing the search space of available Web services. A goal describes an objective that a client wants to solve by using Web services, abstracting from the technical details. Our visualization technique is based on a graph structure that organizes goal templates—i.e. generic and reusable objective descriptions—with respect to their semantic similarity, and keeps the relevant knowledge on the available Web services for solving them. This graph is generated automatically from the results of semantically enabled Web service discovery. In contrast to existing tools that categorize the available Web services on the basis of certain description elements, our tool allows clients to browse available Web services on the level of problems that can be solved by them and therewith to better understand the structure as well as the available resources in a domain. This paper explains the theoretic foundations of the approach and presents the prototypical implementation within the Web Service Modeling Toolkit WSMT, an integrated development environment for Semantic Web services.

Abstract. Information technology is seen as a critical tool to increase the level of automation when incorporating new business requirements due to changing needs. Therefore, one of the key challenges in the organizations today is to ensure the alignment between the business goals and the flexibility and responsiveness of IT systems to meet those goals. In this work we make a step forward in bridging the eternal gap between business and IT. Contribution of this work is two-fold. First, we present an intuitive way of specifying expressive user requests for the implementation of tasks in business process models. Second, we design a comprehensive approach to discovery of Semantic Web Services for process task implementation. The work has been prototypically implemented in a process modeling tool and can be used in different scenarios.