Combining multidimensional user models and knowledge representation and management techniques for making web services knowledge-aware

Abstract

Web Services are widely recognized as the leading deployment paradigm for next-generation Web applications, where users and machines are co-operant and new services can be composed from pre-existent services, by looking at their interoperability level and their semantics. Knowledge personalization is currently the most investigated issue in the context of service-oriented systems on the Web, as the impersonality of the Web information can seriously mine the potentiality of Web Services in building large-scale Web applications. Knowledge representation and management are critical issues for knowledge personalization in Web Services, and are gaining renewed interest from the research community, mainly due to the explosion of data modelling technologies for the Web, such as XML and XML Schema. In this context, user modelling is the other issue to be faced, as the requirements of modern Web applications are more and more complex and sophisticated, and, as a consequence, fine-grain user management is strongly needed. In this paper, we propose a new approach that combines fine-grain multidimensional user models and knowledge representation and management techniques for making Web Services knowledge-aware. We also propose the framework that implements such approach, called Distributed Knowledge Networks (DKN), and provide a reference architecture for DKN. Finally, experimental results about the proposed approach are presented and discussed.