To fulfill the four primary objectives of the study, three main research topics need to be undertaken.
(i) Composition Analysis of e-Services, Web Services, and Semantic Web Services
The study will explore the existing literature within the frameworks of the composition of e-services, web services, and the semantic web service. This will be followed by the identification of current drawbacks with regards to e-services, web services, and semantic web services compositions (including the study of AI-inspired content markup languages and standard/languages, such as OIL, DAML+OIL, UDDI, WSDL, DAML-L, DAML-S (later known as OWL-S[1]), SOAP, and more structured forms of composition (e.g. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)). It has to be noted that there are a number of paradigms for behavioral modeling in current standards and research explorations on services composition (Gerede et al., 2004). For example, the event-based model which allows declarative logic based semantics (Gerede et al., 2004). The aim in this initial investigation is to test early ideas and investigate their viability with early prototypes.
(ii) Characterisation of IeS
The above study of e-Services, web services, and semantic web services (i) will then be used (integrated) to propose a proper characterisation and simulations of intelligent e-Services as well as the choreography thereof. For the intelligent e-Services to be used, a clear mechanism to describe how do IeSs bind?; how do IeSs connect?; and how do IeSs interact? must be answered.
(iii) Framework for the Choreography of Intelligent e-Services
In the role of the evidence and developmental explanation, this will form the basis for the construction of a framework that will facilitate the choreography of intelligent e-services. As part of pragmatic steps, a specific realistic business scenario, such as e-Mentoring[2], will be used to provide an application of the proposed framework, which will be evaluated in order to assess its dynamic efficiency and applicability. Ontologies, on a much broader scale, will be developed to describe the data produced by mentoring analysis which will lead in the integration of the ontologies to the intelligent e-services. There are a number of tools that have been built to allow easy creation, visualization and manipulation of ontologies (Kuropka et al., 2008).
[1] Represents services as concepts in the ontology, not transitions (Pahl and Zhu, 2006). Domingue et al. (2006), argue that OWL-S does not offer any precise definition of choreography, but focuses on a process based description of how complex Web Services evoke atomic Web Services.
[2] e-Mentoring can be explained as a process where a mentee and a mentor communicate via ICT technologies in order to solve certain problems.
The pragmatic steps will consist of the following stages together with the integration of different methods in brackets.
· The representation of e-Mentoring as components of IeSs (interpretation);
· Modelling e-Mentoring as a choreographed set of IeSs (experiment and interpretation using DAML-S, PDDL, and business-process modelling languages). A detailed analysis of the e-Mentoring ontology domain will be modeled. This includes the definition of the concepts, relations, and instances that are going to be used in representing the e-Mentoring domain.
· Implementation of IeSs-based e-Mentoring scenario (observation using existing tools e.g. ebXML). The Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) will be used to add semantic annotations to WSDL components which will give semantic meaning to the intelligent services; and
· Evaluation of the implemented IeSs-based e-Mentoring scenario (observation). Evaluation will be done as major milestones (i.e. the three main research topics above) are completed.