Conceptual Model Based Semantic Web Services

To achieve the dream of the semantic web, it must be possible for ordinary users to invoke services. Exactly how to turn this dream into reality is a challenging opportunity and an interesting research problem. It is clear that users need simple-to-invoke-and-use services. This paper shows that an approach strongly based on conceptual modeling can meet this challenge for a particular type of service—those that involve establishing an agreed-upon relationship, such as making an appointment, setting up a meeting, selling and purchasing products, or establishing employee job assignments. For these services, users can specify their requests as free-form text and then interact with the system in a simple way to complete the specification of a service request, if necessary, and invoke the service. Our system uses a conceptual-model-based information extraction ontology to (1) recognize the request and match it with an appropriate ontology, (2) discover and obtain missing information, and (3) establish agreed-upon, conceptual-model-constrained relationships with respect to the desired service. The paper lays out our vision for this type of semantic web service, gives the status of our prototype implementation, and explains how and why it works.