Re: UDDI and semantics: CMU OWL-S/UDDI Mapping

At 11:56 AM 2003-11-20, Massimo Paolucci wrote:
>The result is a Web service registry that acts as UDDI but it can also 
>answer queries such as "which web service can do X for me?",  which 
>cannnot really answered by the current UDDI.

Please explain this.

I have read some of your papers, and they usually start by claiming UDDI 
only allows keyword searching.

"Because UDDI does not represent service capabilities, it is of no help to 
search for services on the basis of what they provide".
I have a hard time with this claim.

Why don't you feel that the categoryBag in businesses, services, and 
tModels can't be used to answer "which web service can do X for me?"

Lets say that services categorized as Y "can do X".  That is to say, a 
taxonomy is defined where the semantics of a category Y are well understood 
(albeit not represented formally in OWL or other ontology language).

Lets assume you have two services that can "do X for you", call them S1 and S2.

We register them in UDDI (under the same or different businesses).  We add 
to the categoryBag of S1 and S2 a keyedReference

<keyedReference tModelKey=<foo> keyValue="Y" />

where <foo> is the tModelKey for a taxonomy tModel created to register that 
taxonomy in UDDI.

This is a way of expressing that S1 and S2 "can do X".

if I find_service in UDDI with a <categoryBag><keyedReference 
tModelKey=<foo> keyValue="Y" /></categoryBag>,
would I not discover S1 and S2?

This seems like the current UDDI can answer your question, and is more 
powerful than a keyword lookup.

If you search UDDI for a name rather than a categoryBag, then I would agree 
that it is essentially a keyword search.  But UDDI provides the 
categoryBag, which to me is more powerful than a simple "keyword".

The key is learning the taxonomy, for both the people who publish to UDDI 
and the people who would search UDDI using that taxonomy.
Same thing seems like it would apply to ontologies and any other form of 
registry or index.  Training!

UDDI products like Systinet WASP UDDI allow you to search a taxonomy for 
keywords (e.g., keyName=%keyword%).  So if you do not know the taxonomy, 
searching the taxonomy will help you find potential items in a taxonomy, 
which you then use to build up a categoryBag that you use to search 
UDDI.  (Note that you look in the taxonomy for keyName since keyValue is 
often a number.  For example, NAICS keyValue="112111" and keyName="Beef 
Cattle Ranching and Farming".)

If by "current UDDI", you mean that the set of pre-canned taxonomies 
(NAICS, UNSPSC, ISO3166) do not support it, I would agree.  But the current 
UDDI lets you publish tModels for your own taxonomies, which you can then 
use in categoryBags.  The support in UDDI products for working with 
taxonomies can be better.  The web browser (HTML) GUI provided by UBR and 
private UDDI registries usually do not let you specify an unchecked 
taxonomy in a search or in publishing, so you have to resort to the SOAP 
interface.

Paul

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 00:06:53 UTC