Profile Changes for Version 0.7
The main change in this version of the Profile is the clean up of
the non-functional properities that describe various features of
the service. The result is a much cleaner representation of
features of the Profile, and the deprecation of properties that
were either ill defined or redundant with other properties already
in the profile.
An additional change is related with the introduction of the
Profile class as a subclass of ServiceProfile. This allows for
the introduction of alternative forms of the profile that are
different from the ontology we provide here.
Finally, we removed the classes OfferedService and NeededService.
The rational for the change is that the profile provides a
description of a service, be it an actual (offered) service, or a
wishied for (needed) service. Whether a service described is an
actual service, or it is just wished for is left to the discovery
mechanism and it is not specified here.
Description of Non-Functional parameters
In the current release the non-functional properties are described
using three classes: ServiceCategory, QualityRating and
ServiceParameter.
- ServiceCategory The service category is used to
specify how the service is classified within a taxonomic scheme
that may (or may not) be part of DAML. A ServiceCategory
contains the following fields.
- categoryName that specifies the name of the
the classification scheme, this category
could be just a literal, or perhaps the uri of the process
parameter (a property);
- taxonomy that specifies
the name of the taxonomy used (or a url where infomration on
the taxonomy can be found);
- value that specifies the value of the sevice within
the taxonomy;
- code added because often taxonomies associate a
code to each type of service;
Examples of how to use the Service Category have been added to
the Profile ontology, they include a subclass for NAICS and one
for UNSPSC. Actyal instances of the categories can be found in
the Profiles of Congo and BravoAir examples.
- QualityRating There are quality rating service for
web services, and other will definetly be added in the
future. The quality rating of a service will be a very
important issue in the selection of services. The quality
rating thas two fields: ratingName and rating.
- ratingName that specifies the name of the
rating service;
- rating the rating assigned to the service;
As an example of ratingservice we provide D&B based on Dunn and
Bradstreet.
- ServiceParameter There are infinte many properties
that can be assocaited with a service. The class
ServiceParaemter provides an extensible mechanism for defining
new parameters of services. These parameters are necessarily
arbitrary at the moment, but hopefully ontologies of
parameters will develop depending on the needs of the service
and their implementors.
- serviceParameterName a name associated with the
service parameter;
- sParameterthe parameter or the value;
We provide a few examples of service parameters such as
MaxResponseTime and GeographicRadius that is the update on a
deprecated property.
Other changes
-
ContactInformation
the deprecation of the properties
service provider/requester as a consequence of the deprecation
of Offered/Needed Service required the declaration of a new
property that links Actor to Profile. The new property has
been called ContactInformation.
-
Actor
: added property title to the class to
specify what is the title of the person involved.
ParameterDescription
did not change drastically but
a few changes have been done- parameterName turned from DAML:#Thing to
XSD:#string. The name of a parameter is just a string
- restrictedTo added maxCardinality restriction to
1
- refersTo added maxCardinality restriction to
1
Deprecations
The following classes and properties were deprecated because
we decided that the profile should encode the semantics of a
service, but not to specify how the service is going to be used.
- OfferedService
- NeededService
- ServiceRequester
- ServiceProvider
- requestedBy
- providedBy
Other deprecations that are motivated by the lack of a precise
meaning or redundancy with other properties in the profile.
Some of these properties may gain a precise meaning in the
future and be reintroduced in the Profile.
- serviceType redundant with serviceCategory
- intendedPurpose still unspecified
- role still unspecified
- domainResource redundant with preconditions/effects
- geographicRadius too domain specific
- degreeOfQuality redundant with QualityRating
- qualityGuarantee redundant with QualityRating
- communicationThru still unspecified
- Location too domain specific