Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

The Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration (SADI) Web service Design-Pattern, API and Reference Implementation

Background. 
The complexity and inter-related nature of biological data poses a difficult challenge for data and tool integration. There has been a proliferation of interoperability standards and projects over the past decade, none of which has been widely adopted by the bioinformatics community. Recent attempts have focused on the use of semantics to assist integration, and Semantic Web technologies are being welcomed by this community.

Description. 
SADI – Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration – is a lightweight set of fully standards-compliant Semantic Web service design patterns that simplify the publication of services of the type commonly found in bioinformatics and other scientific domains. Using Semantic Web technologies at every level of the Web services “stack”, SADI services consume and produce instances of OWL Classes following a small number of very straightforward best-practices. In addition, we provide codebases that support these best-practices, and plug-in tools to popular developer and client software that dramatically simplify deployment of services by providers, and the discovery and utilization of those services by their consumers.

Conclusions.
SADI Services are fully compliant with, and utilize only foundational Web standards; are simple to create and maintain for service providers; and can be discovered and utilized in a very intuitive way by biologist end-users. In addition, the SADI design patterns significantly improve the ability of software to automatically discover appropriate services based on user-needs, and automatically chain these into complex analytical workflows. We show that, when resources are exposed through SADI, data compliant with a given ontological model can be automatically gathered, or generated, from these distributed, non-coordinating resources - a behavior we have not observed in any other Semantic system. Finally, we show that, using SADI, data dynamically generated from Web services can be explored in a manner very similar to data housed in static triple-stores, thus facilitating the intersection of Web services and Semantic Web technologies

Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

Web Service Discovery in a Semantically Extended UDDI Registry: the Case of FUSION

Service-oriented computing is being adopted at an unprecedented rate, making the effectiveness of automated service discovery an increasingly important challenge. UDDI has emerged as a de facto industry standard and fundamental building block within SOA infrastructures. Nevertheless, conventional UDDI registries lack means to provide unambiguous, semantically rich representations of Web service capabilities, and the logic inference power required for facilitating automated service discovery. To overcome this important limitation, a number of approaches have been proposed towards augmenting Web service discovery with semantics. This paper discusses the benefits of semantically extending Web service descriptions and UDDI registries, and presents an overview of the approach put forward in project FUSION, towards semantically-enhanced publication and discovery of services based on SAWSDL

Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories

In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets, software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist. We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented. We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and arXiv).Comment: 18 pages. Accepted for International Journal on Digital Libraries special issue on Digital Libraries and eScienc

Potentially Polluting Marine Sites GeoDB: An S-100 Geospatial Database as an Effective Contribution to the Protection of the Marine Environment

Potentially Polluting Marine Sites (PPMS) are objects on, or areas of, the seabed that may release pollution in the future. A rationale for, and design of, a geospatial database to inventory and manipu-late PPMS is presented. Built as an S-100 Product Specification, it is specified through human-readable UML diagrams and implemented through machine-readable GML files, and includes auxiliary information such as pollution-control resources and potentially vulnerable sites in order to support analyses of the core data. The design and some aspects of implementation are presented, along with metadata requirements and structure, and a perspective on potential uses of the database

Enabling Semantic Interoperability in e-Government: A System-based Methodological Framework for XML Schema Management at National Level

Articulating semantic interoperability in e-Government remains in question as long as the international standardization efforts do not reach a consensus on how to semantically annotate and exchange data, but merely focus on the syntactic aspects by publishing sets of XML Schemas. As one-stop governmental services at national and cross-county level become an imperative, the need for standardized data definitions, codification of existing unstructured information and a framework for managing governmental data in a unified way emerges. Effectively applied to the Greek e-Government National Interoperability Framework, this paper proposes a methodology for designing semantically enriched XML Schemas with which homogenized governmental information complies, based on the UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS). A discussion around a prospective architecture for managing large sets of XML Schemas is also motivated in order to recognize the necessary components and the key issues that need to be tackled when designing a Governmental Schema Registry