Questions on DAML-S

Hi,

I am currently trying to understand the different standards for 
describing web services and I have a few questions on DAML-S. I would 
appreciate it very much if somebody could throw some light on what I am 
missing.

1. Semantics of DAML-S : I was reading the papers "DAML-S: Semantic 
markup for Web Services" and "Analysis and Simulation of Web Services" 
which describe the semantics of web services described in DAML-S. I 
understand that situational calculus and petri-net based formalisms have 
been used to describe the semantics of composition of atomic web 
services is involved.

My question is: if one takes the view that web service descriptions are 
viewed as sequences of wsdl operations(groundings in DAML-S terminology) 
then does not a simple formalism based on finite state automaton and 
temporal logic suffice to describe and discover the way a particular set 
of web services reacts to inputs and produce outputs?

I am not able to understand how the formalisms based on situational 
calculus and petri-nets help in finding or match-making of web services. 
Or, is it the case that situational calculus etc overlap with the finite 
state machine formalisms.

2. Also, how would one describe a web service which wants to react to 
the kind of inputs sent to it in DAML-S ? For example, consider a web 
service description which awaits a login request or a registration 
request for invoking the rest of the web services. The service proceeds 
with the login procedure if it receives a login request or proceeds with 
the registration process if it receives a registration request.

3. Also, how does one describe a (closed) process in which mutiple roles 
are exchanging messages, basically the kind of processes that standrads 
like ebXML are targetting?

It seems to me that the semantic web approach to web services helps 
services in identifying the data exchanged unambiguosly by confirming to 
agreed upon ontologies??

Any insights are greatly appreciated.

Thanks & Regards,
Kiran.

Received on Tuesday, 1 July 2003 08:39:17 UTC