Fluent calculus-based Web service composition — From OWL-S to fluent calculus

Web service composition facilitates the creation of new services out of existing ones, for satisfying a complex functionality. Automatic Web service composition is considered as one of the most promising features that can be realized by Web services. This paper presents a novel approach for semantic Web service composition based on the fluent calculus. We show how the planning capabilities of the fluent calculus can be used to automatically generate a Web service composition. We have identified a mapping between an OWL-S process ontology and the fluent calculus concepts. We also present an algorithm to translate OWL-S service descriptions into an equivalent fluent calculus service specification. This specification is then forwarded as input to a flux planner to generate the plans that solve the composition goal. As a result, the solution for the requested functionality of the composed Web service is obtained. FLUX is used as the logic programming method to implement the mathematical formalism of the fluent calculus.