Towards an ontology-based approach for specifying and securing Web services

With the increasing popularity of Web services and increasing complexity of satisfying needs of users, there has been a renewed interest in Web services composition. Composition addresses the case of a user request that cannot be satisfied by any available Web service, whereas a composite service obtained by integrating Web services might be used. Because Web services originate from different providers, their composition faces the obstacle of the context heterogeneity of Web services. An unawareness or poor consideration of this heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution result in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that permits tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions. This paper presents an ontology-based approach for context reconciliation. The approach also focuses on the security breaches that threaten the integrity of the context of Web services, and proposes appropriate means to achieve this integrity. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.