A formal method for detecting semantic conflicts in protocols between services with different ontologies

Abstract

The protocol between a web service and its client may lead to semantically inconsistent results if the ontologies used by the server and client are different. Given that the web is growing in a mostly uncoordinated way, it is unrealistic to expect that web services will adhere to standardized ontologies in near future. In this paper we show that if the client publishes its ontology and presents the protocol it intends to follow with a web service, then the web server can perform a semantic verification step to determine formally whether any of the possible executions of the protocol may lead to a semantic conflict arising out of the differences in their ontologies. We believe that this an approach which enables a web-server to automatically verify the semantic compatibility of a client with the service it offers before it actually allows the client to execute the protocol. We model the ontologies as graphs and present a graph based search algorithm to determine whether the protocol can possibly reach a conflict state.