To achieve the dream of the semantic web, it must be possible for ordinary users to invoke services. Exactly how to turn this dream into reality is a challenging opportunity and an interesting research problem. It is clear that users need simple-to-invoke-and-use services. This paper shows that an approach strongly based on conceptual modeling can meet this challenge for a particular type of service—those that involve establishing an agreed-upon relationship, such as making an appointment, setting up a meeting, selling and purchasing products, establishing employee job assignments, and many more. For these services, users can specify their requests as free-form text and then interact with the system in a simple way to complete the specification of a service request, if necessary, and invoke the service. Behind the scenes, the system uses a conceptual-model-based information extraction ontology to (1) recognize the request and match it with an appropriate ontology, (2) discover and ...
Muhammed Al-Muhammed, David W. Embley, Stephen W.