Fully automated web services discovery and composition through concept covering and concept abduction

We propose a framework and tractable algorithms for semantic-based automated Web service composition, fully compliant with Semantic Web technologies. The approach exploits the recently proposed Concept Abduction inference service in Description Logics to extend Concept covering definition to expressive logics, and to solve Concept Covering problems in a significant subset of OWL-DL. We show how the proposed approach also deals with not-exact solutions, computing an approximate composition and providing an explanation of which part of the request is not covered by the composite service. We present the formalization of the approach, the proposed algorithms, a prototype system implementing the approach, and illustrate experiments carried out with it. Copyright © 2007, IGI Global.