Reasoning about interaction protocols for customizing web service selection and composition

This work faces the problem of automatic selection and composition of web services, dis-cussing the advantages that derive from the inclusion, in a web service declarative descrip-tion, of the high-level communication protocol, that is used by the service for interacting with its partners, allowing a rational inspection of it. The approach we propose is set in the Semantic Web field of research and inherits from research in the field of multi-agent sys-tems. Web services are viewed as software agents, communicating by predefined sharable interaction protocols. A logic programming framework based on modal logic is proposed, where the protocol-based interactions of web services are formalized and the use of reason-ing about actions and change techniques (planning) for performing the tasks of selection and composition of web services in a way that is personalized w.r.t. the user request is enabled. We claim that applying reasoning techniques on a declarative specification of the service interactions allows to gain flexibility in fulfilling the user preference in the context of a web service matchmaking process. Key words: Semantic web-services, reasoning about actions, interaction protocols, personalization, agent logic programmin