Web service composition: An approach using effect-based reasoning

This paper proposes an ontology-based approach to compose Web services using the effect-based reasoning. The environment ontology is to provide formal and sharable specifications of environment entities of Web services in a particular domain. For each environment entity, there is a corresponding hierarchical state machine for specifying its dynamic characteristics. Then, this approach proposes to use the effects of a Web service on its environment entities for specifying the Web service's capabilities and designates the effect as the traces of the state transitions the Web service can impose on its environment entities. So, the service composition can be conducted by the effect-based reasoning.