Model Checking Semantically Annotated Services

Model checking is a formal verification method widely accepted in the web service world because of its capability to reason about service behavior at process level. It has been used as a basic tool in several scenarios such as service selection, service validation, and service composition. The importance of semantics is also widely recognized. Indeed, there are several solutions to the problem of providing semantics to web services, most of them relying on some form of Description Logic. This paper presents an integration of model checking and semantic reasoning technologies in an efficient way. This can be considered the first step toward the use of semantic model checking in problems of selection, validation, and composition. The approach relies on a representation of services at process level that is based on semantically annotated state transition systems (asts) and a representation of specifications based on a semantically annotated version of computation tree logic (anctl). This paper proves that the semantic model checking algorithm is sound and complete and can be accomplished in polynomial time. This approach has been evaluated with several experiments.