AGUA (Automatic Grounding Using Annotations) has been developed as a Master Degree Thesis by Miguel GarcC-a RodrC-guez in order to obtain the title of Master in Web Engineering by the EUITIO of the University of Oviedo.
AGUA aims to automate the bi-directional transformation between tree-based data structures and graph-based data structures. Within the scope of
Semantic Web Services, this kind of transformations are part of the grounding process. Such process is the key to automate the invokation to Semantic Web Services, as it is resposible for linking the requests and the responses of the actual Web Services with the Semantic Web Services platform. We formally define grounding as:
A bi-directional process that downgrades a semantic-based model into to a syntactic model by means of a subprocess known as lowering, and raises a sintactic-based model to a semantic-based one in a subprocess called lifting.
In AGUA, a formal method is defined to automate the grounding using semantic annotations. To this end, one the one hand, a mapping language captures the links (semantic annotations) between the data structures defined in the WSDL documents of the Web Services, and the concepts, properties and instances defined in a domain ontology. On the other hand, an algorithm translates the semantic annotations into executable code that implements the lowering and lifting subprocesses.
The formal method proposed in AGUA has been tested in a real production environment, using the WSMX Platform for Semantic Web Services (WSMX has been created by DERI). The standard grounding component of WSMX has been adapted to work as defined by AGUA.
At AGUA WS it can be found a reference implementation of AGUA offered as Web Service. While at example find an implementation of the described Use case.