Policy-based reasoning for smart web service interaction

We present a vision of smart, goal-oriented web services that reason about other services' policies and evaluate the possibility of future interactions. To achieve our vision, we propose a proof theoretic approach. We assume web services whose interface behaviour is specified in terms of reactive rules. Such rules can be made public, in order for other web services to answer the following question: "is it possible to inter-operate with a given web service and achieve a given goal?" In this article we focus on the underlying reasoning process, and we propose a declarative and operational abductive logic programming-based framework, called WAVe