Approximate Matching of Web Services with Description Logic Reasoning

Heterogeneous Internet applications can be easily integrated when they are exported as Web Services, which use XML-based standards for service description and communication.
It becomes possible to provide more sophisticated compound services by combining simpler services. This entails, among other things, the need of precise semantic description
of service demands and supplies and an associated matching mechanism. Technologies under development in the Semantic Web, in particular ontology and rule definition languages, appear to meet the need perfectly. However, as exact matches may be difficult to find and often unnecessary, the matching mechanism ideally should allow certain degree of fuzziness.

In this thesis, we propose an approximate matching scheme that fully exploits the expressiveness of Semantic Web's ontology definition language OWL, which is based on Description Logic, and the inference ability that comes with the logic. To demonstrate the applicability of our scheme, we develop a prototype service matchmaker for the Trip Planner, which is a service composer for the tourism industry developed on Protege.