Semantic Web Services: Past, Present, and Future

Technical Panel, Dynamic Web Processes (DWP) 2005 Workshop

In conjunction with

International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC) 2005

Amsterdam , the Netherlands , December 12^th, 2005

Abstract and Motivations

Semantic Web Services (SWS) promise to facilitate all aspects of Web services usages. The overarching goals of the various SWS efforts are to provide some level of automation of Web services discovery, selection, invocation, and composition. Indeed, early efforts, e.g., OWL-S, have demonstrated results such as dynamically matchmaking and composing Web services using a service ontology that includes descriptions of the services capabilities and needs of the service consumer. Other early efforts, e.g., METEOR-S, developed a broad framework of semantics that can be added to Web services to facilitate their use.

Though decent progress has been achieved, we are far from completely realizing all of the aforementioned goals and gaining wide acceptance. There remain various challenges and questions to be addressed. Recently, newer efforts, i.e., WSMO, SWSF/FLOWS, and WSDL-S, have emerged taking at times a different approach to adding semantics to Web services. Since none of the efforts have been widely adopted (so far) and Web services themselves are facing some challenges from simpler alternatives such as REST and some of the Web 2.0 initiatives; we maybe at a juncture where some discussions and sharing of lessons learned may be needed to galvanize the SWS efforts and community, as well as to give some directions for future research and approaches.

Building on a successful ONTOLOG-forum SWS panel on October 10^th, 2005 , this panel brings together various leaders from the major SWS initiatives and community, from both academia and industry. After a short introduction and presentation from each initiative, we intend to engage in a debate and discussion that will include the following (but not limited to) topics and questions:

1.        How can the complexity of the current SWS approaches be reduced to help gain some wider adoption? After all, the primary goal of the SWS efforts is to facilitate the usage of Web services.

2.        Is a folksonomy-type approach a better, more realistic, alternative to adding semantics to Web services? (similar to efforts like http://del.icio.us and Yahoo! Flickr)

3.        Should the SWS community take a pragmatic approach to adding semantics to Web services by heavily leveraging and extending the existing Web services stack as was done with WSDL-S? Or, is that a flawed approach since it inherits any limitations of the stack?

4.        Should the SWS community agree on some basic standards and help extend and improve the current Web services stack? And what are advantages and disadvantages?

5.        What are some of the low-hanging fruits that the SWS community should strive for first and progressively address the vision questions? What are some basic use-cases (e.g., semi-automated Web services usages with human in the loop and automated Web services usages via software agents)?

6.        Should SWS ontology annotation be limited to OWL-type, FOL DL-type languages? Or, should we look into adopting other languages for ontology/taxonomy constructions, e.g., UML?

7.        Can formal approaches like FLOWS, which provides complete semantics of processes, help the implementation of use cases and achieve results that demonstrate clear advantages for businesses over well accepted languages like BPEL? What are some example use cases that show these advantages? Or should such formal approaches instead leverage and extend languages like BPEL?

8.        What have we learned from current efforts that should drive the SWS roadmap?

Date, Time, and Location

Monday December 12^th, 2005

3:20PM to 4:20PM

The Mercure Hotel, Amsterdam , the Netherlands

Panelists

John Domingue
Deputy Director, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Milton Keynes , UK

Massimo Paolucci
Senior Researcher, NTT DoCoMo Euro Labs, Munich , Germany

Amit Sheth   ppt
Professor and CTO, University of Georgia and Semagix, Inc., Athens, USA

Sheila McIlraith
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada

Francisco (Paco) Curbera
Research Staff Member and Manager, Web Services and Component-Oriented Software, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne , NY , USA

Organizers and Acknowledgements

E. Michael (Max) Maximilien (moderator)
Research Staff Member, Almaden Services Research, IBM >Almaden Research Center, San Jose , CA , USA

Kunal Verma
Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia, LSDIS Lab, Athens, USA

Amit Sheth

David Martin
Senior Computer Scientist, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park , CA , USA .

We also want to thank the ONTOLOG-Forum, its members, and the ONTOLOG-forum SWS Panel organizers and in particular Peter Yim (CIM Engineering, San Mateo, CA, USA) and Nicolas Rouquette (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech, Pasedena, CA, USA).