Creating and Managing WSML Descriptions

Throughout this book we have seen many examples of the usefulness of describing Web services semantically through the WSMO conceptual model and the WSML language. Using these additional semantic descriptions of Web services it is possible for many parts of the process of building Service Oriented Architectures to be automated. Most importantly service providers and service requesters can be dynamically bound together at runtime, rather than hardwired to one another at application design time. Such runtime binding involves tasks like service discovery, selection, composition, adaptation, mediationof both data and process, and invocation, with these tasks taking place within a Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) like the Web Service Execution Environment (WSMX) [72] or IRS-III [38]. A Semantic Execution Environment acts a broker between the service requester and the many services available on the web, ensuring that the right service is chosen for the requester that can solve the user's problem and that interoperability problems between the requester and the service can be automatically resolved.

However the process of creating the necessary semantic descriptions in WSML for a SEE to function is not a trivial task and without tool support many of the tasks that need to be performed by the engineer can be lengthy and involved, essentially discouraging the adoption of Semantic Web service technology by industry. In this chapter we describe the Web Service Modeling Toolkit (WSMT)1 [85, 86], an Integrated Development Environment for Semantic Web services that supports the engineer through the full life cycle of their semantic descriptions in WSML, from creation, through validation and testing, to deployment on a Semantic Execution Environment.