The paper presents the tool HarmonICS designed for automated com- position of medical services and implementing our approach to description and composition of web services. HarmonICS enables arranging sequences of services to satisfy a user's request specified by a query. The query language is rich enough to express requirements on the timing and the ordering of services used. We present a new tool for automated composition of web services (WS) related to the medical domain. The tool implements our original approach (7) to WS composition, based on introducing a uniform semantic description of services, an object model for the problem, and applying a multi-phase composition supported by model checking methods. The planning process aims at satisfying a user's goal, specified in a declar- ative language, which enables not only to express features of the objects, but also re- quirements on the timing and ordering of services occurring in the plan. The WS composition problem is a very important subject of research for which many various solutions exist. The simplest ones are based on explicit state space search algorithms (16), while more advanced ones employ a graph-based planning (5), logic programming (14), an AI planning (13, 11), model checking methods (10, 12), and ge- netic algorithms (3). Vitvar et al. (17) proposed a solution based on WSMO/WSML (15) formalisms. While the fundamental ideas of their concepts seem similar to ours, it is important to mention that our approach is simpler and thus much easier to implement. Our considerations follow that of Ambroszkiewicz (1), which provides a specifi- cation of an automatic composition system based on a multi-phase composition and uniform semantic descriptions of services. However, several extensions like enriched descriptions of services or a hierarchic organisation of services and objects they operate on, have been additionally designed. Doing all that, we keep the semantic base as sim- ple as possible, which aims at enabling a translation of the WS composition problem to a problem solvable by means of eficient methods and tools from other domains.
['D. Doliwa', 'Wojciech Horzelski', 'Mariusz Jarocki', 'Artur Niewiadomski', 'Wojciech Penczek', 'Agata Półrola', 'Jaroslaw Skaruz']
HarmonICS - a Tool for Composing Medical Services ?