Semantic Web Service Architecture — Evolving Web Service Standards toward the Semantic Web

May 2002

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

All Papers

The importance of Web services has been recognized and widely accepted by industry and academic research. However, the two worlds have proposed solutions that progress along different dimensions. Academic research has been, mostly concerned with expressiveness of service descriptions, while industry has focused on modularization of service layers --- mostly for usability in the short term. This paper is concerned with merging these two streams of progress. Our point of departure is the current proposal by IBM. Its proposal is extended by Semantic Web technologies such that a smooth evolution from Web services in the current Web to Web services in the Semantic Web appears possible and --- in fact --- highly desirable. As a showcase we describe SWOBIS, an ontology-compatible registry for software tools, that represents a first step towards developing a search engine for Web services based on Semantic Web technologies.