June 13, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Current computer technology is seriously limited in how computers “talk” and share data. Enabling two or more systems to communicate and exchange information is a costly and time consuming process. The addition of semantic information to describe Web Services – a current hot IT research topic – promises to unleash the potential of dynamic, scalable and cost-effective e-Business applications, allowing the real-time discovery of simple online services and automatically combining these into more complex services.
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), a leading European research institute in the field of Semantic Web and Semantic Web services (SWS) technology, is pleased to announce the submission of its Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www.w3.org/ Submission/2005/06/). WSMO is a comprehensive framework for addressing Semantic Web services challenges and it is designed to help overcome the current problems of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). WSMO has been in development over the past two years by the WSMO working group lead by DERI.
Professor Dieter Fensel, Scientific Director of DERI, highlights one of the main benefits of WSMO:
“WSMO is a big step forward in establishing Semantic Web services as the new infrastructure for e-Work and e-Commerce. It [WSMO] contributes substantially to solving one of the most difficult and costly problems in IT, namely allowing disparate systems to share and integrate information in a cost effective way. This is a perennial problem for companies and represents billions of dollars in technology spending, with around 30% of worldwide IT budget dedicated to integration efforts. This technology will enable organisations to make substantial savings in their IT investments and increase their agility in changing business processes according to market needs.”
The WSMO submission to the W3C consists of three main documents: Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO); Web Service Modeling Language (WSML); Web Service Execution Environment (WSMX), plus two supporting documents, Relation of WSMO to other relevant technologies, and WSMO Primer.
• The Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) provides ontological specifications for the core elements of Semantic Web services.
• The Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) provides the language to formally describe all the elements defined in WSMO.
• WSMX is an execution environment that enables discovery, selection, mediation, invocation and interoperation of SWSs and provides a reference implementation of WSMO.
WSMO has been developed and deployed in collaboration with a number of industrial partners and research groups making up the WSMO working group (http://www.wsmo.org). Further enhancements are planned in the light of feedback from the W3C, knowledge and insights from real-world case studies, and from ongoing work in related research projects and networks of excellence.
