Projekt SWWS

Semantic Web Enabled Web Services

Web Services will transform the web from a collection of information into a distributed device of computation. In order to employ their full potential, appropriate description means for web services need to be developed. There are important steps to take to bring web services and fully enabled E-commerce to reality. Bringing E-commerce to its full potential requires a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach. Anybody must be able to trade and negotiate with everybody else. However, such an open and flexible E-commerce has to deal with many obstacles before it becomes reality. Mechanized support is needed in finding and comparing vendors and their offers. Machine processable semantics of information allows to mechanize these tasks. Mechanized support is needed in dealing with numerous and heterogeneous data formats. Ontology technology is required to define such standards better and to map between them. Mechanized support is needed in dealing with numerous and heterogeneous business logics. Finally, mediation is needed to compensate these differences, allowing partners to cooperate properly. Fully enabled E-commerce based on workable web services requires a modeling framework that is centered around two complementary principles: Strong de-coupling of the various components that realize an Ecommerce application. This de-coupling includes information hiding based on the difference of internal business intelligence and public message exchange protocol interface descriptions. Strong mediation service enabling anybody to speak with everybody in a scalable manner. This mediation service includes the mediation of different terminologies as well as the mediation of different interaction styles.

For this purpose we are working on a full-fledged Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF) that provides the appropriate conceptual model for developing and describing web services and their composition. The philosophy of WSMF is based on the following principle:

  • maximal de-coupling
  • complemented by scalable mediation service.

This is a pre-requisite for applying semantic web technology for web service discovery, configuration, comparison, and combination. A model in WSMF consists of four main different elements:

  • ontologies that provide the terminology used by other elements;
  • goal repositories that define the problems that should be solved by web services;
  • web services descriptions that define various aspects of a web service; and
  • mediators which bypass interoperability problems.