A Planner for Composing Services Described in DAML-S

Sheshagiri M., desJardins M., Finin T.

A web service is a web-accessible piece of software or hardware. In recent years, industry has been showing increasing interest in web services as a technology for building distributed web applications. However, web services as a technology lacks in several departments. Representations for describing web services have been widely investigated by industry and academia. Service composition-that is, automated methods for constructing a sequence of web services to achieve a desired result- has been relatively neglected. We present in this paper, a planner that composes atomic/basic services described in DAML-S (Ankolenkar et al. 2002) into a composite service. We discuss issues involved with the design of planners for composition. We also propose a set of guidelines for describing services that facilitates composition.