LarKC Plug-In Annotation Language

The aim of the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC) project is to develop a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning for the Semantic Web. The LarKC Plugins – services that can be used in the LarKC platform play a key role in the context of LarKC. They are the core elements that are composed in a concrete LarKC pipeline – a particular configuration of LarKC plug-ins that enables massive distributed reasoning under various configurations of reasoners and other elements. Since multiple providers are expected to contribute with various plug-ins to the LarKC community and a large number of available plug-ins are expected, there is a clear need for a mechanism to handle plug-ins in a flexible way and to enable discovery and composition of such plug-ins. A key requirement to enable such tasks is to have explicit specifications of the functional and non-functional properties of plug-ins. This paper describes an initial mechanism for specifying plug-ins as semantically enriched Web services. We propose WSMO-Lite as a basis for specifying the functionality of LarKC plug-ins, and describe a list of non-functional properties that characterize the quality of service of plug-ins. Finally, we show how plug-in descriptions are used in a typical concrete LarKC pipeline.