| Introduction: | Chris Bussler, DERI Ireland Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University |
| OWL-S: | Katia Sycara |
| WSMO: | Sinuhe Arroyo, DERI, Austria Christoph Bussler, DERI, Ireland Liliana Cabral, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK John Domingue, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK Ruben Lara, DERI, Austria Matthew Moran, DERI, Ireland Michael Stollberg, DERI, Austria Laurentiu Vasiliu, DERI, Ireland Michael Zaremba, DERI, Ireland |
| Conclusion: | Chris Bussler and Katia Sycara |
Web Services combined with Semantic Web are being considered as the Next Big Wave of innovation in e-commerce and B2B integration. Web Services are also offered across Grid Computing in support of e-science. Recent industrial interest in Web Services, Semantic Web and the availability of tools and standards to enable automated invocation of business functionality through message exchange (e.g. SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, BEPL etc) holds the promise of fast progress in this area.
An increasing number of Web Services using basic semantics are starting to appear. Today, services (e.g. travel services, book selling services, stock reporting services etc) are discovered and invoked manually by human users. In the near future, such service discovery and use will be mediated by computational entities, thus making the Web and Web Services computer understandable. Instead of being populated with human-readable documents, the Web will be populated with computer-mediated services.
This tutorial will take an in-depth look at the current state of the art in the Semantic Web and Web Services and sort through the increasing and confusing array of relevant tools, languages and theories both from academia and industry. The tutorial will also present and discuss semantics for Web Services and their potential for business value added. Many examples to illustrate the described concepts, techniques, tools and their use will be presented. The tutorial brings together material and tools from the Semantic Web and Web Service standards technologies. In addition, the tutorial will present different approaches for enhancing Web Services with semantics. More importantly, the tutorial will discuss limitations of current technologies and present value added advanced concepts, such as distributed service composition, Semantic Web enabled Web Services, agent-mediated Web Services, as well as open issues that must be addressed. Alternative approaches will be presented and compared and a substantial list of references will be provided. The tutorial is self contained and accessible to practitioners, researchers and students.
In particular this tutorial will focus on presenting semantics for Web Services with illustrations from two approaches, OWL-S and WSMO, that will be presented concurrently in order to emphasize their commonalities and differences. OWL-S (http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/) is an effort supported by DARPA and is part of the DAML program. WSMO (http://www.wsmo.org) is an effort supported by European national and international projects.
The high-level structure of the tutorial is as follows