World Wide Web Consortium Holds Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services

Groups to identify points of intersection between Web services and Semantic Web

 

http://www.w3.org/ -- 9 June 2005 - Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) opens the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web services in Innsbruck, Austria. Hosted by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) Innsbruck and supported by EC's IST programme WS2 project, over 60 organizations are presenting papers which aim to identify areas of shared interest between Web services and Semantic Web communities.

Semantics description is key to several high-level Web services concerns

Web services standards, under development in the W3C Web Services Activity and other organizations, make up an integrated technology stack that Web applications developers can rely on to ensure interoperability. From the beginning, research has been conducted to meet particular needs in this area, such as registering resources or services, discovering resources or services on the Web, composing a service by using several other services, etc. The early solutions consist of using Web agents, often using pre-defined directories, sometimes simply crawling the Web.

In parallel, the W3C Semantic Web Activity has developed the initial building blocks of the Semantic Web technologies: the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The W3C Semantic Web Services Interest Group - with over 450 participants - has shown strong interest in having more integrated semantics inside the Web Services stack, and also provides evidence of a rich variety of research proceeding in this area. This work aims towards the general objective of a more comprehensive, more expressive framework for describing all aspects of services, which can enable more powerful tools and fuller automation of a broad range of Web services activities.

Interest in identifying shared solutions is growing

Recently, during the W3C Constraints and Capabilities Workshop, proposals including Semantic Web technologies have already been discussed, in the light of requirements for expressing policies for Web Services. W3C is now looking into a generic extensible framework based on Semantic Web technologies, to support longer-term objectives, while continuing to develop immediate solutions for the most pressing Web Services requirements. Integration to the Web Services stack, and also in the Web architecture, should be key properties of such a framework.

The intent of the workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services is to provide advice to W3C on possible future work in the area. By bringing together heterogeneous communities (Semantic Web and Web Services communities, researchers and industrial software developers and users), W3C hopes to identify better use cases, leading to more effective and comprehensive solutions. Topics covered include:

• Semantic Web background technologies; e.g. RDF, OWL
• Web Services background technologies; e.g. SOAP, WSDL
• Registries, taxonomies, and search mechanisms; e.g. UDDI
• Ontologies for Web Services; e.g. OWL-S, WSMO
• Web Services Choreography; e.g. WS-CDL
• Business process; e.g. BPEL4WS

Next Actions to include final report

Following the two-day workshop, W3C is to issue a report with conclusions based on presentations and discussions. All materials, including the papers themselves, are available for public review.

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology. To date, over 350 organizations are Members of the Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

 

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