Ontology and Service Oriented Programming

Dear all,

 

I would like to introduce my work on the area of Semantic Web Services. Your
comments are welcome! By the way, since I will graduate soon, I appreciate
so much if you can provide me with job opportunities. Please visit my
research site, http://asusrl.eas.asu.edu/oso.

 

During my PhD program, I focus on distributed applications development and
integration. My goals are to provide an approach that supports rapid
distributed application development with implementation techniques
transparency to developers and propose a solution to integration multiple
distributed applications automatically. 

 

For the above purposes, it is discovered that ontology is a straightforward
and convenient manner for developers to describe business logic. Moreover,
based on ontology-oriented descriptions, it is possible to implement a
converter that transforms them into programming codes, i.e., real
distributed applications.

 

At present, service oriented architecture is an appropriate way to integrate
heterogeneous systems in the Internet based environment. So I propose a
fundamental developing component, service, to model a particular domain.
Different from the current developing methodology, the service is described
in the ontology oriented format since I believe this way is more convenient
than traditional programming ones.

 

Besides developing using ontology-oriented descriptions, another important
advantage of ontology and service oriented approach is that system
integration can be based on the same specification. It saves many efforts.
If standard ontology libraries exist for application domains, integration is
processed automatically without human's interventions, such as invoking
methods manually, understanding semantics, writing integrating scripts and
so on.

 

In summary, ontology and service oriented programming provides a
straightforward and machine comparable business logic description.
Therefore, system development is much easier than current ones because of
most implementation details are transparent to developers. Furthermore,
system integration is carried out automatically because business logic is
understandable based on matching, i.e., service discovery and selection.

 

Since 05/2001, I have partially implemented the above ideas. Compared with
current popular research, such as DAML-S/OWL-S and BEPL4WS, my work has a
lot of new contributions.

 

However, there still exist some issues which I should improve. First, it is
clear that my current ontology oriented descriptions cannot cover all the
business logic in the real business circumstance. For example, I haven't
thought about the issue of timing. Second, usually, a typical distributed
application is built into three-tier architecture. My final goal is to
generate all the three tiers according to ontology oriented descriptions.
But it is a difficult topic. Is it possible to generate a presentation tier,
e.g., the navigation interface, which meets all types of customers'
requirements? How to handle database management issues at the back end?
Business logic in the middle tier should have different views for different
customers? Third, the business logic understanding is based on matching. But
the current matching approach is still simple with the too restricted
conditions, a standard domain ontology library. However, in reality, it is
not practical. Is it possible for my system to work on a non-standard domain
ontology library? What constraints should be required for developers to
describe their business logic in order to get the balance between a more
natural business logic description and machine understanding?

 

If you are interested in that, you can visit my research Web page,
http://asusrl.eas.asu.edu/oso. There you can find demo software package,
demo tutorial and presentation slides. Two of my recent papers are attached
with the email. They contain most of my current work. I submit them to the
International Journal of Web Services Research. They are still in the review
process.

 

I wish my work could be useful to your group projects! Your advice is highly
appreciated. If I have an opportunity to work with you, it must improve my
research and strengthen professional experiences to a great degree.

 

Looking forward to your replies!

 

Best regards,

 

Bing Li