serviceGroup/targetResource experimental ontology

This weekend I tried playing around a bit with modeling services with  
targetResource and serviceGroup in OWL. Mostly, I wanted to try to  
concretize some of my intuitions (and, to be frank, my biases :)) Here  
is the current version:

	http://www.mindswap.org/~bparsia/ontologies/test/wsdl-target-and- 
group.owl

Some results (not in the formal sense; just on my thinking):

	1) It seems to me that targetResource, whatever it is, is more  
naturally attached to operations, since it is via operations that the  
Service does anything to anything.
	2) But, even then, I don't find targetResource useful. I do think  
preconditions and effects are (surprise surprise, but it really was for  
me :)).
	3) I think a "logical" targetResource as the "set of things  
manipulated by the Service or by an operation" tends toward the  
redundant at best, and tends to miss the interesting things about how  
services or operations are related.
	4) In the absence of other metadata, the concept of a "Service" (qua  
group of operations) seems uninteresting. targetResource gives the  
illusion that a Service is a semantically coherent group of operations  
(in the sense that they all manipulate the same resource), but when the  
targetResource is just the set of resources manipulated by the  
operations of the Service...well..I trust the pointlessness is clear.

I plan to keep playing with the ontology and will happily try to encode  
alternatives that people suggest.

Oh, while I think preconditions and effects are critical, I'm not  
suggesting we add them to the WSDL  
that-might-soon-be-formerly-known-as-1.2. Right now, there isn't a  
standard semantic web language that most Semantic Web Services folks  
agree is sufficently expressive for representing the kinds of  
preconditions and effects one would want to in Web services. DAML-S,  
for example, basically has punted on this issue, thus far.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Monday, 14 July 2003 16:49:59 UTC