Adapting the communication of Web services to the language of their user community

This paper presents the WS-Talk interface layer, a concept for a structured natural language interface which virtualizes the composition of Web services at the end-user´s side. As the number of available Web services grows, the representation of the context in which they are used becomes more and more an issue for both service providers and service consumers. While providers concentrate more on the technical levels of activation and communication within a service network, the users, i.e. the service consumers, want to form ad-hoc collaborations between Web services. To shield users of Web services from the technical details of finding and combining them, a semantic level has to be found that suits their specific needs and expertise. Through a semantic layer, WS Talk tries to create a level of abstraction that enables views on services expressed in natural language. To reduce the complexity of natural language, domain-specific languages are defined and their semantics are mapped onto Web services and their attributes. The domain of economics is currently used for testing architecture and usage aspects of the WS-Talk interface layer.