SOCA DOI 10.1007/s11761-013-0150-6 ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER A semantic selection approach for composite Web services using OWL-DL and rules Amel Boustil · Ramdane Maamri · Zaidi Sahnoun Received: 17 May 2012 / Revised: 23 July 2013 / Accepted: 4 December 2013 © Springer-Verlag London 2013 Abstract Most of the studies on the semiautomated com- posite Web services select concrete services based on the functional and/or non- functional attributes. However, they do not consider relationships between these attributes in the description of services or the user constraints. In this work, we propose an approach, which relates services to objects (resources) maintained by these services. The user can impose his constraints on the objects affected by the requested services. The affected object and their relation- ships are described in an intermediate ontology using OWL- DL and SWRL languages. Our selection strategy consid- ers the relationships between services by looking for the dependent instances (conforming objects values) of affected objects that satisfy the user constraints and by combining the related services to get conforming composite services. The proposed selection approach of conforming composite services is implemented by using semantic Web tools and languages. Keywords Abstract service · Concrete service · OWL · SPARQL query 1 Introduction Web services composition is a highly active studied research direction. It provides a mechanism to aggregate a multiple services into one composite service. In contrast to the tra- ditional Web service composition based on IA planning or workflow, there are a lot of Web services offered by different providers providing the same functionality; however, these A. Boustil (B ) · R. Maamri · Z. Sahnoun Lire Laboratory, University Constantine 2, 25000 Constantine, Algeria e-mail: boustil1710@yahoo.fr services that have different values of attributes describing functional or non-functional properties (NFP) could be gath- ered into a collection of Web services (category, task, type, community, abstract service) and used to select and to deter- mine the most appropriate concrete (instance) service. The ultimate goal of the composition research is to pro- vide a fully automatic process. Such semiautomatic Web ser- vice compositions are essentials when for example consid- ering user constraints for each abstract service where spe- cific Web services are not predefined. All semiautomatic approaches [1–14] are based on an existing abstract com- position and on instantiating this abstract composition by selecting the most appropriate concrete Web services with respect to user constraints and service properties. Selection for the purpose of the composition process depends on user constraints imposed on functional properties (FP) (for example, the user seeks a three stars hotel) or NFP (for example, the user seeks a service with high availability). It has to take care of the difference between conforming com- posite Web service when we talk about constraints on the FP and the optimized composite service when we impose con- straints on NFP. Most of the solutions [1, 15–18] that calculate the optimized composite service are generally syntax-based approaches, focusing on the optimization problem and use some optimization algorithms such as Integer programming or genetic algorithms. When we consider the problem of con- forming composite services [3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10], semantic-based approaches are generally used to locate and match functional attributes describing individual concrete services. Describing services by considering only input and output information cannot guarantee that the composed service will provide the requested functionality as mentioned in [19, 20]. There have been some studies on the automated discov- ery and composition [9, 10, 19–21] of Web services that add objects in the description of the functional semantics of ser- 123