Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web services has been a vigorous technology research area for
about six years, producing a great deal of innovative work. In this
Part 2 'Trends & Controversies' installment, the authors continue
exploring the state of the art, current practices, and future directions
for Semantic Web services. SWS aims to bring Semantic Web technology --
for representing, sharing, and reasoning about knowledge -- to bear in
Web service contexts. The objective is to enable a fuller, more flexible
automation of service provision and use and the construction of more
powerful tools and methodologies for working with services. The
introduction [Part 1] includes references for major SWS initiatives,
such as SAWSDL, OWL-S, WSMO, SWSF, and the Internet Reasoning Service.
Part 1 also includes essays by Michael L. Brodie and Frank Leymann that
discuss service technology needs from a long-term industry perspective.
This issue concludes with four more essays. The first two essays are
primarily concerned with nearer-term directions -- steps that will let
us build out from the current state of the art toward greater adoption
and applicability of SWS approaches. Amit Sheth lays out a near-term
roadmap of steps that will be essential for industry acceptance of SWS
approaches, starting from SAWSDL and current industry practice. He
counsels that essential steps are required to make SWS approaches
sufficiently accessible and economically attractive to industry. Steve
Battle starts with an analysis of OWL-S's strengths and limitations.
He then discusses the necessary evolution of business ontologies for
SWS. Along with the evolution of business practices, this will allow
for Web services and SWS approaches to come together. The final two
essays put forward longer-term agendas for the evolution of SWS. Katia
Sycara argues that SWS could benefit from decoupling itself from the
basic stack of Web service standards rather than following a more
incremental trajectory tied to their evolution. She also identifies
two important opportunities in which this strategy could pay off.
Dieter Fensel takes a broad perspective, arguing that the
characteristics of Internet-scale service usage, and problem solving
in general, call for an entirely new conceptualization of some of the
core challenges of computer science for the 21st century.

Semantic Web Services, Part 1

Semantic Web services (SWS) has been a vigorous technology research
area for about six years. A great deal of innovative work has been done,
and a great deal remains. Several large research initiatives have been
producing substantial bodies of technology, which are gradually maturing.
SOA vendors are looking seriously at semantic technologies and have
made initial commitments to supporting selected approaches. In the
world of standards, numerous activities have reflected the strong
interest in this work. Perhaps the most visible of these is SAWSDL
(Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema). SAWSDL recently
achieved Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium.
SAWSDL's completion provides a fitting opportunity to reflect on the
state of the art and practice in SWS -- past, present, and future.
This two-part installment of 'Trends & Controversies' discusses what
has been accomplished in SWS, what value SWS can ultimately provide,
and where we can go from here to reap these technologies' benefits.
The essays in this issue effectively define service technology needs
from a long-term industry perspective. Brodie starts by recognizing
that, although industry has embraced services as the way forward on
some of its most pressing problems, SOA is a framework for integration
rather than the solution for integration. He outlines the contributions
that are needed from semantic technologies and the implications for
computing beyond services. Leymann emphasizes the broad scope of
service-related technical requirements that must be addressed before
SWS can effectively meet businesses' IT needs and semantically enabled
SOA can be regarded as an enterprise solution rather than a mere
packaging of applications. He argues that a great deal remains to be
done in several important areas. More Information See also W3C SAWSDL Click Here