Using RIF / SWRL for automated service composition

Dear all,

Having implemented a Service Matchmaking Tool for the Semantic Service Specification OWL-S, we are now thinking about a service composition planner based on OWL-S. A review of literature revealed that
a lot of approaches have been proposed so far, but there does not seem to exist a really mature solution. The key question in most of the cases is how to describe
preconditions, inConditions and effects in order to use efficient AI Planning techniques. Most of the approaches either use some XML representation of PDDL or transform
one of the Semantic Web Rule Languages (KIF, SWRL) into PDDL, since the AI Planning community mainly relies on this representation and a lot of planners have already been
implemented on it. However, since PDDL is not related to OWL, we would like to use a rule representation that is related to OWL and does not need an additional transformation.

Our first intention was to use SWRL for this purpose, since there is a lot of tool support (API, Reasoner). Nevertheless, SWRL is quite an old W3C submission and has never reached
the status of a recommendation. Another option seems to be RIF, which is a W3C recommendation and has some conceptual approaches for the combination with OWL. On the other
hand as far as I know there is no real tool support so far for using RIF together with OWL.

My question is: what do you think about using SWRL / RIF for semantic service composition? Do you have any experiences on this or do you know better approaches?

Best regards,

Nils

--
Nils Masuch
Dipl.-Inform.

Researcher
Competence Center Agent Core Technologies

nils.masuch@dai-labor.de<mailto:nils.masuch@dai-labor.de>
Fon +49 (0) 30/314 -74 094
Fax +49 (0) 30/314 -74 003

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