ASCEND: a framework for automatic service composition and execution in dynamic environment

Web service is becoming more and more popular on the Internet. Composing existing services into large functional units will bring added values for organizations. Due to the dynamic characteristic of the Internet, building a framework for service composition and execution must provide a mechanism to design and execute service composition in a very flexible and efficient way. To build such a framework, some basic issues related to services must be put into consideration. These issues include service description, service registration, service discovery, service matching and so on. To resolve those problems in an automatic or semiautomatic way, semantic knowledge is the key. ASCEND is a framework to provide a resolution for service composition and execution automatically and dynamically. In ASCEND, we combine ontology with service registration so that the automatic service discovery and service matching can be realized based on ontology inference.