Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

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WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE FOR SERVICES (OWL-S)

OVERVIEW

Web Services are self-contained, self-described, component applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. They perform functions that can be anything from simple requests to complex business processes involving multiple simple services. Once a Web Service is deployed, other applications can discover and invoke the service. At present, Web Services require human interaction for identification and implementation.

Tim Berners-Lee has suggested that the integration of Web Services and the Semantic Web could offer significant performance improvement for Web applications. Integration could combine the business logic of Web Services with the Semantic Web’s meaningful content. There are several areas where the two could work well together. For example, the current technologies for discovery (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, UDDI), binding (Web Services Description Language, WSDL), and messaging (Simple Object Access Protocol, SOAP) technologies could use OWL to provide an ontology for automatic Semantic Web Services, thereby allowing interaction with Web business rules’ engines.¹

In this chapter we present the building blocks for the next generation of Web Services: Semantic Web Services. OWL and OWL for Services (OWL-S) create logic statements for inference engines utilizing Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that allow manipulation of application logic directly through Web markup languages. ...