1 Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
{E.Motta, J.B.Domingue, L.S.Cabral} @open.ac.uk
2 Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, University of Bologna, Italy
Abstract. In this paper we describe IRS-II (Internet Reasoning Service) a framework and implemented infrastructure, whose main goal is to support the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, augmented with semantic descriptions of their functionalities. IRS-II has three main classes of features which distinguish it from other work on semantic web services. Firstly, it supports one-click publishing of standalone software: IRS-II automatically creates the appropriate wrappers, given pointers to the standalone code. Secondly, it explicitly distinguishes between tasks (what to do) and methods (how to achieve tasks) and as a result supports capability-driven service invocation; flexible mappings between services and problem specifications; and dynamic, knowledge-based service selection. Finally, IRS-II services are web service compatible - standard web services can be trivially published through the IRS-II and any IRS-II service automatically appears as a standard web service to other web service infrastructures. In the paper we illus-trate the main functionalities of IRS-II through a scenario involving a distributed application in the healthcare domain.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference 2003 ( ISWC 2003), 20-23 October 2003, Sundial Resort, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA