A reusable commitment management service using Semantic Web technology

Commitment management is a key issue in service provisioning in the context of virtual organisations (VOs). A service provider – which may be a single agent acting within an organisation, or the VO acting as a collective whole – manages particular resources, and commits these resources to meet specific goals. Commitments can be modelled as constraints on resources. Such constraints are often soft: they can be broken if necessary. The goal of the work described in this paper is to create an open, reusable commitment management service (CMS) based on Semantic Web standards. The chief requirement is that the CMS should be reusable in different domains, able to manage commitments over services described in a wide range of domain-specific service ontologies. This paper presents open Semantic Web representations for (1) expressing individual commitments as constraints over service descriptions, (2) capturing a set of commitments as a soft constraint satisfaction problem, and (3) representing and communicating the solution to a soft CSP. A reference implementation of a constraint solver able to operate on (1) and (2) to produce (3) is described, and its reuse is demonstrated in two distinct domains: e-commerce and e-response.