Ontology-supported web service composition: An approach to service-oriented knowledge management in corporate financial services

Web service composition can enhance the efficiency and agility of knowledge management by composing individual Web services together for complex business requirements. There are two main research streams in knowledge representation for Web service composition: the syntactic-based approach anti the semantic-based approach. Despite the promises brought by each approach, the two streams are largely separated from each other In this article, we propose an integrated ontology-supported Web service composition framework, which provides a novel solution to organizational knowledge management. By synergistically leveraging both syntactic-based and semantic-based approaches, this framework provides dual modes to perform service composition. Ontologies are employed to enrich semantics at both the service description and composition levels. The proposed conceptual framework has been implemented in the corporate financial services domain. It is demonstrated that the shared ontology helps to fulfill automated and on-the-fly service composition in particular and knowledge management in general.