Semantics framework

June 9-10, 2005
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Innsbruck, Austria

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Workshop minutes for June 9th am, June 9th pm, June 10th am, June 10th pm.

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, some 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, starting from the need for metadata in resources, 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 has shown a 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.

Recently, during the Constraints and Capabilities Workshop, proposals including Semantic Web technologies have already been discussed, in the light of requirements for expressing policies for Web Services. We now aim at 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. The OWL-S submission has already demonstrated interest in this approach. 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, in particular the creation of a Working Group.

There is a lot of potential relationship to existing Semantic Web efforts as well as to existing Web Services development. It includes:

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

Discussion of the relationship of these areas to the workshop topic is encouraged.