From Algebraic Specification to Ontological Description of Service Semantics

The accurate description of service semantics plays a crucial role in service discovery, composition and interaction. Most work in this area has been focussed on ontological descriptions, which are searchable and machine-understandable, but do not define service functionality in a verifiable and testable way. Formal specification techniques, having evolved over the past 30 years, can define semantics verifiably and testablly, but they have not yet been applied to service computing because formal specifications are not searchable. There is a huge gap between these two methods of semantics description. In this paper, we bridge the gap. Our technique is to specify services formally in an algebraic specification language and then to extract ontological description as profiles in the language OWL-S, with the associated searchability benefits. We present a prototype tool for performing this transformation and report a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. The algebraic specification language we use is SOFIA (Service Oriented Formalism in Algebras).