Enabling Semantic Web Services

by Fensel, Dieter; Lausen, Holger; Polleres, Axel; de Bruijn, Jos; Stollberg, Michael

• ISBN13: 9783540345190
• ISBN10: 3540345191
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-03
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Summary

Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in current IT research and development. Web services seem to be the middleware solution of the future for highly interoperable distributed software solutions. In parallel, research on the Semantic Web provides the results required to exploit distributed machine-processable data. To combine these two research lines into industrial-strength applications, a number of research projects have been set up by organizations like W3C and the EU. Dieter Fensel and his coauthors deliver a profound introduction into one of the most promising approaches ' the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief presentation of the underlying basic technologies and standards of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, they detail all the elements of WSMO from basic concepts to possible applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking, and they also describe its relation to other approaches like OWL-S or WSDL-S.While many of the related technologies and standards are still under development, this book already offers both a broad conceptual introduction and lots of pointers to future application scenarios for researchers in academia and industry as well as for developers of distributed Web applications.

Author Biography

Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel is the scientific director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). His current research interests include Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web Services, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Application Integration, and Electronic Commerce. He has been involved in several national and international research projects, for example, in the IST projects DIP, IBROW, Knowledge Web, On-To-Knowledge, Ontoweb, SWWS, and Wonderweb. He is the project coordinator of dip, Knowledge Web, Ontoknowledge, Ontoweb, and SWWS. He published around 150 papers as books and journals, book, conference, and workshop contributions and won the Carl-Adam-Petri-Award of the Faculty of Economic Sciences from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (2000).

Table of Contents

Foundations
Introduction	p. 3
The World Wide Web	p. 7
History	p. 7
The Building Blocks: URIs, HTTP, and HTML	p. 10
From HTML to XML	p. 14
Summary	p. 24
The Semantic Web	p. 25
Ontologies and the Semantic Web	p. 27
The Resource Description Framework	p. 31
The Web Ontology Language OWL	p. 33
Rules for the Semantic Web	p. 34
Summary	p. 36
Web Services	p. 37
Terminology and Principles	p. 39
The Origins of Web Services	p. 40
The Web Service Technology Stack	p. 42
Web Services in Reality	p. 49
What's Missing in Web Services?	p. 50
Summary	p. 53
The Web Service Modeling Ontology
Introduction to WSMO	p. 57
WSMO Design Principles	p. 57
Top-Level Elements of WSMO	p. 59
The Language for Defining WSMO	p. 60
The Concepts of WSMO	p. 63
Ontologies	p. 63
Web Services	p. 67
Goals	p. 74
Mediators	p. 75
Nonfunctional Properties	p. 78
Summary	p. 81
WSML - a Language for WSMO	p. 83
The WSML Layering	p. 84
General WSML Syntax	p. 85
WSML Semantics	p. 93
WSML Exchange Syntaxes	p. 94
Key Features of WSML	p. 97
Relation to RDF(S) and OWL	p. 98
Summary	p. 99
Related Work in the Area of Semantic Web Service Frameworks	p. 101
OWL-S	p. 101
SWSF	p. 104
WSDL-S	p. 107
Summary	p. 109
Tools and Applications
Semantic Web Service Usage Tasks in WSMO	p. 113
The Virtual Travel Agency Scenario	p. 113
Discovery	p. 115
Mediation	p. 124
Composition	p. 132
Grounding and Execution	p. 135
Tools	p. 141
Infrastructure	p. 141
Design Tools	p. 145
Execution Environments	p. 151
Summary	p. 156
Applications of WSMO	p. 157
E-Commerce	p. 157
E-Government	p. 165
E-Banking	p. 166
Summary	p. 168
Conclusion and Outlook	p. 169
Semantic Web Services Using WSMO	p. 169
Standardization Efforts	p. 170
Industrial Collaboration	p. 173
Alternatives to Classical Web Services	p. 174
References	p. 177
Index	p. 187
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