An Approach for Composing Services Based on Environment Ontology

Table 1

Meanings of the concepts.

Concept	Meaning
Environment entity	Entities which a system will interact with
Causal entity	Entities whose properties include predictable causal relationships among its shared phenomena
Autonomous entity	Entities which can receive or send message autonomously usually consist of people
Symbolic entity	Entities which are a physical representation of data
Attribute	A named variable for characterizing a static property of an entity
Static attribute	Characterize the static properties of the environment entity
Dynamic attribute	Characterize the dynamic properties of the environment entity
Value	Intangible individual entity that exists outside time and space, and is not subject to change
Tree-like hierarchical state machine	A hierarchical state graph for characterizing dynamic properties of a causal entity
Finite state machine	A directed state graph for characterizing a dynamic property
Divide	Relation between the basic state machine and a state
State	Value of an entity at a given time
Transition	A state change in a state machine represent the relation between two states
Message	The content that is sent or received from one environment entity to another
Command message	Containing the action command
Data message	Message that has no command contains only the parameters
Interaction	Observable shared phenomenon between a system and its environment entity
Message interaction	Interaction that occurs through the messaging
Value interaction	Interaction that occurs through reading or assigning the value of the static attribute