Goal-directed service flow planning using metaknowledge on services

The rapid development of Semantic Web in recent years has resulted in the emerging standards -- RDF, OWL, SWRL, for representing knowledge in the Web environment. At the same time, the concept of Grid computing has emerged to cope with distributed resource sharing in a trusted environment, where Globus is currently the de facto standard of grid middleware with its latest version recently embraced by Web services. While it seems natural and essential to wrap the Grid with semantics to further ease the distributed knowledge management issues, how they should effectively be integrated to solve user-defined problems remains open. In this paper, we propose a goal-directed planning methodology for problem solving in a Web/Grid Services environment. Problem context, metaknowledge on services relationship and user profiles are carefully incorporated with the objective to make the underlying on-demand planning process remain manageable as the size of the Semantic Web/Grid scales up. An example related to its application to stock analysis support is included to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology.