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Challenge on Automating Web Services Mediation, Choreography and Discovery

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Image:KW_logo.pngImage:sti-ibk.pngImage:sti-int.png [Stanford Logic Group]

The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The intent of this challenge is to explore the trade-offs among existing approaches. Additionally we would like to figure out which parts of problem space may not yet be covered.

Our most important service is that we provide a certification of SOA (Service Oriented Achitecture) technologies. We challenge the technical community to show what their web service mediation, discovery, and composition technologies can really do.

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Detailed Description

The Challenge workshops seek participation from industry and academic researchers developing software components and/or intelligent agents that have the ability to automate mediation, choreography and discovery processes between Web services.


The Challenge aims to provide a forum for discussion based on a common application base. The approach is to provide a set of problems that participants solve in a series of workshops. In each workshop, participants self-select which scenario problems, and sub-problems they would like to attempt to solve. Solutions are verified by Challenge staff - participants must invoke the right web services with the right sequence of correct messages in order to solve each problem. In addition, we attempt to evaluate the level of effort of the software engineering technique used in going from a problem to a sub-problem. This evaluation methodology is evolving in the W3c SWS Testbed Incubator. The most recent is linked under Scenarios as are the problems and past solutions. As of February 2008, there is a report of Recommended Best Practices from the Incubator.

The most current solutions and their evaluations are always displayed below on this home page. This constitutes a certification that the Challenge staff has verified the solution and that the workshop attendees evaluated the software engineering of the solution and came to a consensus, possibly with some footnotes, as below. Participant may then make claims on their home website, linked to this wiki, and may use the Challenge logo to indicate certification of the claims.

Participants are also expected to share their code and/or ontologies and to add scenarios. This is an "open source" initiative to create a space of re-usable test but real web services and associated ontologies. Participants are encouraged to "steal" parts of solutions from each other in order to eventually converge upon the "best of breed" solutions for types of problems.


Because of this methodology, we will limit the number of participants to a relatively small group so that we can carefully examine the solution of each participant, usually on the 2nd day of the workshop.

Related Work

This SWS Challenge is related to but distinct from the IEEE Web Services Challenge. The WSC is indeed beginning to consider semantics in relating XML descriptions of the input and output messages of the WSDL. The SWSC allows participants to provide additional semantic annotations of the WSDL in order to solve the problems and also evaluates the efficacy of the different approaches to doing so.

Similarly, this SWS Challenge is related to but distinct from the Semantic Services Selection (S3) Contest. It is related in that both initiatives attempt to create common testbeds of servies and both evaluate the efficacy of semantic annotations for service selection. However, the SWS Challenge problem set is not limited to service discovery but includes other types of problems including service mediation and composition.

More important, with respect to to both the WSC and S3 Contest, theSWSC Challenge emphasizes not computer and software speed but rather programmer productivity. It assumes that semantic annotations of web services (derived from the natural language scenario descriptions in the formalism of the participant's choice) will show such productivity, but all approaches are welcome.

We note that the S3 Contest additionally makes a comparative measurement of the retrieval performance of tools for semantic service discovery (e.g. recall, precision, F1, accuracy, average query response time), which are not measured by the SWS Challenge.


Finally, unlike either the WSC or the S3 Contest, the SWS Challenge is a certification challenge rather than a contest. One may see from the results that certain technologies can solve more problems than others, but there is no official winner. All participants are winners in that they have been certified to be able to substantiate the claims of their papers by demonstrating their solution on a common set of problems, in comparison to, and in consensus with, other participants and the Challenge staff.


About this Wiki

This Wiki is dedicated as a collaboration platform for the Semantic Web Service Challenge. Note:To use the testbed and contribute to the wiki you will need an account; You most likely already have an account, check the user list. If you forgot your password, go to the login page and request to resend your password. For editing information in this wiki you require an account. If you have not yet received one please mail Srdjan Komazec (srdjan.komazec<at>sti2<dot>at).

Mailing list

This Wiki is accompanied with the SWS-Challenge Participants mailing list. The list is intended to be used as general discussion forum regarding various SWS-Challenge issues (e.g. workshop organization, testbed functionality, scenario details, etc). In order to subscribe to the list please visit https://lists.sti2.at/mailman/listinfo/sws-challenge-participants and follow the instructions.

Most Recent Certification Results

For detailed information and to access the available technical content of the individual solutions, please visit the solution overview and documentation page or use the links in the table header below.

Table Evaluation Results
Problem Level PoliMi - Cefriel
(Solution Details)
DERI AT & DERI IE
(Solution Details)
FSU Jena
(Solution Details)
University of Dortmund
(Solution Details)
LSDIS Labs
(Solution Details)
IBM - Max Maximilien
(Solution Details)
0: Static mediation
1a: Changes data mediation 1
1b: Changes process mediation 6 2
1c: Mediation/integration for payment authorization √+ √+ 4
2a: Discovery based on Destination 3
2b: Discovery based on Destination and Weight 5 3
2c: Discovery based on Destination, Weight and Price 3
2d: Discovery involving simple composition
2e: Discovery including temporal reasoning 7
3a: Discovery based on clear defined product specifications - Goal A1
3a: Discovery based on clear defined product specifications - Goal A2
3b: Discovery 3B - Additionally specify preferences - Goal B1
3b: Discovery 3B - Additionally specify preferences - Goal B2
3c: Discovery 3C Composition of services - Goal C1 (unrelated composition)
3c: Discovery 3C Composition of services - Goal C2 (correlated composition)
3c: Discovery 3C Composition of services - Goal C3 (unrelated but global condition)
3c: Discovery 3C Composition of services - Goal C4 (unrelated with global condition and preferences)

1Only adapters changed

2Different addresses on line item level have not been addressed correctly

3No automated invocation

4Partially implemented

5Arithmetic calculation performed by external Web services (which is absolutely good)

6Abstract code model change

7Algorithm is correct, but not complete

+ Successfully implemented "Surprise Problem"