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Much of the research on automated Web Service Composition (WSC) relates it to an AI planning task, where the composition is primarily done offline prior to execution. Recent research on WSC has argued convincingly for the importance of optimizing quality of service, trust, and user preferences. While some of this optimization can be done offline, many interesting and useful optimizations are data-dependent, and must be done following execution of at least some information-gathering services. In this paper, we examine this class of WSC problems, attempting to balance the trade-off between offline composition and online information gathering with a view to producing high-quality compositions efficiently and without excessive data gathering. Our investigation is performed in the context of the semantic web employing an existing preference-based Hierarchical Task Network WSC system. Our experiments illustrate the potential improvement in both the quality and speed of composition generation afforded by our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web service composition (WSC) – loosely, the composition of web-accessible software systems – requires a computer program to automatically select, integrate, and invoke multiple web services in order to achieve a user-defined objective. It is an example of the more general task of composing business processes or component-based software. Our doctoral research endeavours to make fundamental contributions to the knowledge representation and reasoning principles underlying the task of WSC, with a particular focus on the customization of compositions with respect to individual preferences. The setting for our work is the semantic web, where the properties and functioning of services and data are described in a computer-interpretable form. In this setting we conceive of WSC as an Artificial Intelligence planning task. This enables us to bring to bear many of the theoretical and computational advances in reasoning about action and planning to the task of WSC. However, WSC goes far beyond the reaches of classical planning, presenting a number of interesting challenges that are relevant not only to WSC but to a large body of problems related to the composition of actions, programs, business processes, and services. In what follows we identify a set of challenges facing our doctoral research and report on our progress to date in addressing these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We claim that user preferences are a key component of effective Web service composition, and one that has largely been ignored. In this paper we propose a means of specifying and intergrating user preferences into Web service composition. To this end, we propose a means of performing automated Web service composition by exploiting a flexible template of the composition in the form of a generic procedure. This template is augmented by a rich specification of user preferences that guide the instantiation of the template. We exploit the agent programming language Golog to represent our templates as Golog generic procedures and we exploit a first-order preference language to represent rich qualitative temporally-extended user preferences. From these we generate Web service compositions that realize a given generic procedure, satisfying the user΄s hard constraints and optimizing for the user΄s preferences. We prove our approach is sound and optimal. Our system, GologPref, is implemented and interacting with services on the Web. The language and techniques proposed in this paper can be integrated into a variety of approaches to Web or Grid service composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]