The task of verifying the compatibility between interacting web services has traditionally been limited to checking the compatibility of the interaction protocol in terms of message sequences and the type of data being exchanged. Since web services are developed largely in an uncoordinated way, different services often use independently developed ontologies for the same domain instead of adhering to a single ontology as standard. In this work we investigate the approaches that can be taken by the server to verify the possibility to reach a state with semantically inconsistent results during the execution of a protocol with a client, if the client ontology is published. Often database is used to store the actual data along with the ontologies instead of storing the actual data as a part of the ontology description. It is important to observe that at the current state of the database the semantic conflict state may not be reached even if the verification done by the server indicates the possibility of reaching a conflict state. A relational algebra based decision procedure is also developed to incorporate the current state of the client and the server databases in the overall verification procedure.
Significant amount of research has been done towards the development of the protocol. In @cite_23 researchers proposed a methodology for developing protocols in a multi agent environment. They extend propositional dynamic logic to formally specify the protocol and also use an extension of state-charts for visual representation. In @cite_14 a step by step procedure is presented for the development of web service interaction protocols from the problem definition to the final specification. However these approaches are focused towards the development of protocol for multi agent environment. The semantics of the exchanged data is not addressed in these works.
@cite_14 @cite_23
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Much current research is focussed on developing agent interaction protocols (AIPs) that will ensure seamless interaction amongst agents in multi agent systems. The research covers areas such as desired properties of AIPs, reasoning about interaction types, languages and tools for representing AIPs, and implementing AIPs. However, there has been little work on defining the structural make up of an agent interaction protocol, or defining dedicated approaches for developing agent interaction protocols from a clear problem definition to the final specification. This paper addresses these gaps. We present a dedicated approach for developing agent interaction protocols. Our approach is driven by an analysis of the application domain and our proposed structured agent interaction protocol definition. Although interaction protocols are often part of multi-agent infrastructures, many of the published protocols are semi-formal, vague or contain errors. Formal presentations can counter such disadvantages since they are amenable to verification of correctness. On the other hand, a diagrammatic representation of system structure is easier to comprehend. To this end, this paper bridges the gap between formal specification and intuitive development by: (1) proposing an extended form of propositional dynamic logic for expressing protocols completely, with clear semantics, that can be converted to a programming language for interaction protocols and (2) developing extended statecharts as a diagrammatic counterpart.