Web services are fast becoming the accepted way for companies to do business electronically. The web service paradigm also promises to enable more adaptable enterprise application integration, helping companies to become more agile and responsive to change. One of the goals of the web services vision is to allow inter-operability between (and within) organisations whilst not overly constraining how the particular services are implemented. The ultimate goal is to support the demand-led automatic formation of composed web services.
Current web service standards such as BPEL4WS, UDDI and WSDL, are intended to support the automatic discovery and composition of services. However, the current standards lack expressive power. The goal for semantically enabled web services is that the properties, interfaces, capabilities and effects of web services are explicitly defined and described in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable way. The result will be a highly flexible and adaptable approach to doing business on the web, enabling new kinds of business models to emerge and allowing companies to respond quickly and flexibly to the changing business environment.
Problems Addressed
The main objectives for the Semantic Web-Enabled Web Services (SWWS) project are:
- To provide a comprehensive Web Service description framework.
- To define a Web Service discovery framework.
- To produce scalable Web Service mediation middleware.
SWWS is a 30-month EU-funded project that started in September
2002. (see also HP Labs' Semantic
Web Research)
The SWWS consortium members are:
- IFI - Institut für Informatik, University of Innsbruck,
Austria: Project co-ordinator
- HP - Hewlett Packard -UK
- NUI - National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
- FZI - Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany
- ISOCO - Intelligent Software Components S.A., Madrid,
Spain
- OntoText Lab.- Sirma AI Ltd., Bulgaria
- BT- British Telecom - UK
Our Contribution
The main contributions from HP Labs will be on the development of a mediation architecture and through the provision of two B2B case studies. The case studies are being developed in partnership with HP's global Software Licence Management System and HP Supply Chain IT.
The mediation architecture will allow organisations that use different business and communications protocols to inter-operate. Explicit domain models (ontologies) defining the meaning of message elements, coupled with mappings relating different ontologies to one another, will allow organisations to use their preferred protocols, safe in the knowledge that the underlying infrastructure will manage the resulting "conversations". The main challenge is in understanding how to enrich service descriptions to support the management of the type of long-lived interactions typical of B2B. As messages are exchanged, all parties need to "understand" the resulting obligations and responsibilities.
HP Labs plans to use the results and experience from the
mediation work to help us develop Semantic Web solutions for
HP, enhance our understanding of the use of ontologies, and
develop new tools. We will also use the case study demonstrators
to help educate key personnel in the HP Services and Consultancy
organisations as to how semantic web technology could be relevant
to their customers.
Below: Bringing the Web to its full potential (diagram of
Semantic Web-Enabled Services vision)
Contacts: Abdel Boulmakoul, Janet Bruten
for
information on related research, see our Semantic
Web research site
|
printable version
