Abstract: Web Services are widely recognized as the leading deployment
paradigm for next-generation Web applications, where users and machines are
co-operant and new services can be composed from pre-existent services, by
looking at their interoperability level and their semantics. Knowledge
personalization is currently the most investigated issue in the context of
service-oriented systems on the Web, as the impersonality of the Web
information can seriously mine the potentiality of Web Services in building
large-scale Web applications. Knowledge representation and management are
critical issues for knowledge personalization in Web Services, and are gaining
renewed interest from the research community, mainly due to the explosion of
data modelling technologies for the Web, such as XML and XML Schema. In this
context, user modelling is the other issue to be faced, as the requirements of
modern Web applications are more and more complex and sophisticated, and, as a
consequence, fine-grain user management is strongly needed. In this paper, we
propose a new approach that combines fine-grain multidimensional user models
and knowledge representation and management techniques for making Web Services
knowledge-aware. We also propose the framework that implements such approach,
called Distributed Knowledge Networks (DKN), and provide a reference
architecture for DKN. Finally, experimental results about the proposed approach
are presented and discussed.
Keywords: Knowledge representation and management, intelligent techniques for knowledge personalization, web services, data and service personalization, multidimensional user modeling, XML data management
