Checking e-service consistency using Description Logics

We propose a new framework for the analysis of functional properties of e-services supporting the development of Cooperative Information Systems. The framework aims at extending and integrating different approaches providing both a rich domain specification and a suitable operational semantics of the e-service contract, on which we define functional consistency properties. It allows for specifying complex e-services based on the IOPE paradigm, in which the static properties of the modeled system are specified using a Description Logic knowledge base, as assumed in Semantic Web applications. Moreover, it enforces a minimal-change semantics for the axiomatization of the update operator and also includes the ability to reason about update repairing w.r.t. the domain constraints, thus allowing for incomplete service specification. On this foundation, we formally devise several consistency and validity properties of services, providing decidable checking procedures. © 2007 IEEE.