Resolving heterogeneity of Web-service composition in network manufacturing based on ontology

Abstract

Web-service composition provides more powerful service functions through integrating existing Web services on the Internet, and collaborative working and resource-sharing among enterprises on the Internet have become a popular trend by means of Web-service composition technologies. Network manufacturing plays an important role in the manufacturing domain and can be realized based on Web-service composition. However, heterogeneity exists widely in complicated Web-service composition, except for manufacturing resources, and this must be resolved. In this paper, we focus on the heterogeneity existing in the execution of composite Web services in network manufacturing, in which the heterogeneity is classified into the heterogeneity between semantic equivalent Web services and the heterogeneity between subsequent Web services in a composite service. We summarize five types of conflicts, namely Semantic Conflict, Parameter Data Type Conflict, Parameter Structure Conflict, Parameter Number Conflict, and Parameter Data Unit Conflict. According to these five types of conflicts, an ontology-based approach for resolving them is proposed, including the definition of domain business process ontology knowledge, domain and industry ontology knowledge, and meta-ontology knowledge about transformation rules. Finally, a case is given, and the implementation technologies are introduced. The ontology based on heterogeneity resolution policy should be established as middleware and applied to any domain to make Web-service composition more available.

Keywords:

• Web-service composition
• Network manufacturing
• Ontology
• Heterogeneity
• Transformation rule
• Web services