Reliable service composition by adopting assumptions.

Although the development of Web Service technology has made significant progress, there is still a lack of a well-established mechanism for ensuring reliable service composition. Unlike a traditional software module, which runs within a predictable domain, Web Services are autonomous software agents running in a heterogeneous execution environment. These characteristics of autonomy and heterogeneity are fundamental to service oriented computing but make it inherently difficult to avoid service conflicts. To reason about and adapt to a changing environment, we propose extensions to current OWL-S by introducing service assumptions which allow reasoning with incomplete information. Furthermore, together with the proposed service assumptions, a sequence of rules is developed to describe and perform all permitted behaviors in service composition context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]