Re: OWL-S question: multiple atomic processes

Dear Brian,

Thanks for your response! I was indeed thinking of defining my own "Service"
OWL class, which could contain multiple OWL-S processes, and thereby would
still do what I want. However, this is a custom extension to OWL-S.

Is defining the three distinct services as a composite choice process a good
alternative, or is it just a hack, abusing the OWL-S spec? Can you still
choose yourself which of the three services will be executed?

>From the spec:

<quote>
: Choice calls for the execution of a single control construct from a given
bag of control constructs (given by the components property). Any of the
given control constructs may be chosen for execution.
</quote>

The sentence "any of the given control constructs may be chosen for
execution" makes me think it it not possible.

I am going to add more metadata to OWL-S services  as a custom extension, so
it is actually no disaster if I would have to define a "service" of my own,
on top of the three OWL-S services.

Thanks in advance!

--
Jo Vermeulen
Expertise Centre for Digital Media - Hasselt University
Wetenschapspark 2
3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium
tel: +32-11-268411
http://jozilla.be/

On 11/28/06, Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu> wrote:
>
> On Nov 22, 2006, at 7:24 PM, Jo Vermeulen wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a question about OWL-S. Is it possible to define a service as
> > consisting of several different atomic processes?
>
> Yes.
>
> > I don't mean atomic
> > processes composed into one composite process.
>
> Even in addition to that, though it's probably not what you want :)
>
> > If I use OWL-S API to convert GoogleSearch.wsdl [1] to OWL-S, I get
> > three different files, one for each operation (doSpellingSuggestion,
> > doGetCachedPage, doGoogleSearch). What I want is to combine these
> > atomic processes into one service description.
> [snip]
>
> Well, there's no trouble at all in putting them in *one file*. That's
> easy. If you want to have a single "Service" object "represent" three
> distinct bits of functionality, there are, as I said, a number of
> ways to do it. For one, you could use a Choice composite process.
> While in a sense it "composes them into one composite process" it
> also models what you're asking for...a service that can provide any
> of three distinct bits of functionality.
>
> I would say that this is the canonical way. But, just because I said
> so :) Well, other than having a file with three service objects in
> it, which, of course, could share properties.
>
> You could "abuse" simple processes :)
>
> You could make an object "service collection" that hung certain
> metadata off the grouping. This would be an extension, of course.
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>
>
>