Semantic Web Services for University Course Registration

Abstract

Semantic web services, with proper security procedures, have the potential to open up the computing infrastructure of an organization for smooth integration with external applications in a very controlled way, and at a very fine level of granularity. Furthermore, the process of using the provided functionality, consisting of discovery, invocation and execution of web services may be automated to a large extent. In this paper, we show how semantic web services and service-oriented computing can facilitate this integration in the education domain. Specifically, we use the Rule variant of Web Services Modeling Language (WSML) to semantically specify the functionality of web services for on-line course registration, a goal for consuming the provided functionality, as well as the ontologies needed for a shared terminology between the service and goal.