Dynamic Ontologies: a Framework for Service Descriptions

Dynamic Ontologies: a Framework for Service Descriptions was an EPSRC funded research project.

Brief Description

Current research on Semantic Web/Grid services aims to make web based services more readily accessible to automated processes. In particular, it should be possible to automatically discover and use web/grid based services in order to perform some given task, and to automatically compose multiple services in order to perform more complex tasks.

Ontologies are set to play a key role in this scenario by providing precisely defined vocabulary that can be used to describe and reason about services. In this context, however, current web based ontology languages have several limitations, one of the most serious of which is that they are inherently .static": they have no means to model changes in the world that may result from, e.g., performing a service.

Extending these languages in a principled manner will first require an extension of the underlying logical languages on which they are based, namely expressive description logics, in order to better describe services with their dynamic aspects. We propose to do this by extending existing description logics with notions of time (both quantitative and qualitative), and with the ability to represent and reason about service actions. This will include theoretical investigations of the properties of such logics, the development of decision procedures for key reasoning problems and the evaluation of their utility in prototypical implementations.