Abstract: To adapt composite services with changes in dynamic environment agility and effectively,a semantic Web oriented method for the evolution of composite service which named EM4CS was proposed systematically. Taking composite services described by OWI= S as research object, EM4CS divides the evolution process into 3 parts, and covers the evolulion cycle in 6 stages, i. e. evolution requirements capturing, formal representation of evolution requirements, syntactic consistency maintenance, semantic consistency maintenance, confirmation of evolution results, publication and broadcasting of evolution results. The composite service evolution process was analyzed from the perspective of system enginecring, and the evolution requirements were fulfilled in an iterative refined way, in which the syntactic and semantic consistency were also maintained. The composite service evolution support system, which follows EM4CS, named ESS4CS,was also introduced in this paper. ESS4CS can assist knowledge engineer in the whole process of composite service evolution, and the efficiency and precision of the evolution process are also improved.

Key words: Semantic Web, Composite service evolution, Composite service, EM4CS, ESS4CS, OWL-S