RE: Composition as planning

At 00:41 05/02/2004 +0100, Charlie Abela wrote:
>8. Certain planning techniques have not yet been explored as solutions to 
>WSC: partial-order
>planning. What are the drawbacks here?

We are exploring the use of O-Plan/I-Plan methods including hierarchical 
HTN operators and partially ordered plans to SWS.  We have already used 
O-Plan in more traditional process management and workflow domains. We 
should keep in touch.

>My questions are related to the idea of a planning ontology:
>
>Will there be the need for such planning ontologies that define planning 
>concepts like operators,
>actions etc, as related to WSC (web services composition)?
>If yes what advantages might this provide to the composition problem?
>Could this be a starting point for standardising composed plans created by 
>specific planning
>technique?


Yes, and a good place to start may be NIST PSL (http://ats.nist.gov/psl/) 
which is also proposed as the process model for SWSL (http://www.swsi.org/) 
which might be a successor to OWL-S.  PSL is being moved as an possible ISO 
standard for process interchange.  It has a relatively simple core ontology 
with a formal semantics and also has extension mechanisms.

Our own approach is to have a fundamental abstract ontology at the core of 
our process model on which rich and extendable process/activity/plan 
representations can be based.  We call this <I-N-C-A> (Issues - Nodes - 
Constraints - Annotations). It actually applies to descriptions of any 
synthesised thing (which includes plans) It specifies a set of constraints 
on the space of artefacts of interest in the domain.  In work that has just 
started as part of our DARPA DAML program funded project we are using this 
as the core of our SWS composition approach.., translating SWS descriptions 
(e.g. OWL-S, WSDL atomic steps, etc.) into this form to augment HTN and 
case libraries, and then translating back to SWS languages on need. 
<I-N-C-A> can conceptually underlay NIST PSL (and other SWS process languages).

Try this as one recent writeup of <I-N-C-A>...

Tate, A. (2003) : an Ontology for Mixed-initiative Synthesis Tasks, 
Proceedings of the Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems (MIIS) 
at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 
(IJCAI-03), Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2003/2003-ijcai-miis-tate-inca.pdf

Here is a recent AAAI Spring 2004 Symposium paper from the IHMC/AIAI team 
working on this which describes what we aim to achieve with our SWS 
composition and policy analysis tool (I-K-C-E)

Uszok, A., Bradshaw, J.M., Jeffers, R., Johnson, M., Tate, A., Dalton, J. 
and Aitken, S. (2004) Policy and Contract Management for Semantic Web 
Services, AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford University, California, USA, 
March 2004.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2004/2004-aaai-spring-uszok-sws.pdf

Hope that's useful Charlie, Austin

Received on Thursday, 5 February 2004 05:02:27 UTC