Introduction to Semantic Web Services

In one of my earlier post I talked in brief about the Semantic Web Services (SWS). Today I was reading another Conference paper on Semantic Web Services titled "Approaches to Semantic Web Services" and there I came across few interesting facts about the same.

Semantic descriptions of Web Services are necessary in order to enable their automatic discovery, composition and execution across heterogeneous users and domains. Current technologies for Web Services provide description at the syntactic level. This makes it difficult for the requesters and providers to interpret or represent non-trivial statements such as the meaning of input and output parameters or any constraints that apply to them.

By applying a rich set of semantic notations that augment the service description we can relax this limitation described earlier. A Semantic Web Service is defined through a service ontology, which enables machine to interpret the capability of the service as well as makes it easy to understand the domain in which the Service is applied to.

Semantic Web Service infrastructures can be characterized along three orthogonal dimensions viz usage activities, architecture and service ontology. These dimensions relate to the requirements for SWS at business, conceptual and physical level.

1. Usage Activities define the functional requirements which a framework for SWS is ought to support.
2. The Architecture of SWS defines the components needed for accomplishing these activities.
3. The Service Ontology aggregates all concept models related to the description of a SWS and constitutes the Knowledge-Level model of the information describing and supporting the usage of the service.
   

The activities required for running an application using SWS includes : publishing, discovery, selection, composition, invocation, deployment and ontology management. In future posts we will discuss each of them in detail.

Until Next Time...:)