A multi-agent approach for generating ontologies and composing services into executable workflows

This paper proposes rethinking how ontologies are used to compose web services into business processes. Unlike handcrafted ontologies, we describe using a multi-agent system (MAS) to automatically generate semantic mappings from service interfaces. Comparing synonyms and contextual clues, we infer meanings of input and output parameters with no explicit semantics (as in a Web Services Description Language document). We further describe how this semantic mapping can be used to derive executable processes by comparing the derived ontologies of each service interface and mapping each service's outputs to inputs of every other service and finding the paths through the resulting graph.