Title: Data flow analysis and testing for OWL-S semantic web service compositions

Authors: Chien-Hung Liu; Shu-Ling Chen; Teng-Yi Huang

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, No. 1, Sec. 3, Chung-Hsiao E. Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan ' Department of Management and Information Technology, Southern Taiwan University, No. 1, Nan-Tai St., Yungkang Dist., Tainan 710, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, No. 1, Sec. 3, Chung-Hsiao E. Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan

Abstract: Semantic web services (SWSs), which integrate the concept of ontology to support incorporation of machine understandable semantics into web services, have drawn much attention in recent years. By introducing semantics into web services, the quality and robustness of web service discovery, selection, and invocation can be greatly improved. However, web ontology language for service (OWL-S), the most widely accepted standard used to describe SWS, is extremely complex and hard to understand. This makes OWL-S compositions difficult to analyse and test. In view of this, this paper proposes a data flow testing approach for web service compositions based on OWL-S. The data flow test artefacts introduced by OWL-S are identified and thoroughly analysed. A test model that considers a variety of control constructs and semantics of OWL-S is proposed to abstract these test artefacts. Based on the test model, test paths can be derived to effectively uncover defects caused by improper data handling and message exchanges of OWL-S compositions.

Keywords: service-oriented architecture; SOA; web ontology language for service; OWL-S; semantic web; web services; SWSs; data flow analysis; data flow testing; service composition; data handling; message exchange.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2013.057299

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2013 Vol.8 No.4, pp.349 - 360

Received: 08 Feb 2012
Accepted: 03 May 2012

Published online: 27 Dec 2013 *

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