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doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(03)00228-7 
Copyright © 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
Analysis and simulation of Web services*1
Available online 10 April 2003.
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Abstract
Web services––Web-accessible programs and devices––are a key application area for the Semantic Web. With the proliferation of Web services and the evolution towards the Semantic Web comes the opportunity to automate various Web services tasks. Our objective is to enable markup and automated reasoning technology to describe, simulate, compose, test, and verify compositions of Web services. We take as our starting point the DAML-S DAML + OIL ontology for describing the capabilities of Web services. We define the semantics for a relevant subset of DAML-S in terms of a first-order logical language. With the semantics in hand, we encode our service descriptions in a Petri Net formalism and provide decision procedures for Web service simulation, verification and composition. We also provide an analysis of the complexity of these tasks under different restrictions to the DAML-S composite services we can describe. Finally, we present an implementation of our analysis techniques. This implementation takes as input a DAML-S description of a Web service, automatically generates a Petri Net and performs the desired analysis. Such a tool has broad applicability both as a back end to existing manual Web service composition tools, and as a stand-alone tool for Web service developers.
Author Keywords: Knowledge representation formalisms and methods; Representation languages; Representations; Predicate logic; Frames and scripts; Algorithms; Design; Standardization; Languages; Theory; Verification; Semantic web; DAML; Ontologies; Web services; Web service composition; Distributed systems; Automated reasoning
