Automatic orchestration of web services through semantic annotations

A new service can be developed as an orchestrated composition of existing web services. This paper describes an original process to automate the composition of semantic web services, by processing their "semantic tags". These tags can be extracted from the WSDL descriptions of the services and inserted into a light semantic description attached to the operations of the considered web services. A specific mechanism can examine these tags and determine automatically the possible "connectivity" of two given web services: the output of WS1, for example, semantically fits with the input of WS2. Then, the two web services are semantically connectable. This process can be used within the context of a service creation environment, in which the developer often wishes to assemble different services corresponding to an initial request. By using the semantic tags, a specific composition mechanism is able to connect automatically the chosen services and to assemble them to produce the final service that fits with the original request.