ServLog: A Unifying Logical Framework for Service Modeling and Contracting

Implementing semantics-aware services, which includes semantic Web services, requires novel techniques for modeling and analysis. The problems include automated support for service discovery, selection, negotiation, and composition. In addition, support for automated service contracting and contract execution is crucial for any large scale service environment where multiple clients and service providers interact. Many problems in this area involve reasoning, and a number of logic-based methods to handle these problems have emerged in the field of Semantic Web Services. In this paper, we lay down theoretical foundations for service modeling, contracting, and reasoning, which we call ServLog, by developing novel techniques for modeling and reasoning about service contracts with the help of Concurrent Transaction Logic. With this framework, we significantly extend the modeling power of the previous work by allowing expressive data constraints and iterative processes in the specification of services. This approach not only captures typical procedural constructs found in established business process languages, but also greatly extends their functionality, enables declarative specification and reasoning about services, and opens a way for automatic generation of executable business processes from service contracts.