IRS III: a platform and infrastructure for creating WSMO based semantic web services

The IRS project has the overall aim of supporting the automated or semi-automated construction of semantically enhanced systems over the inter-net. IRS-I supported the creation of knowledge intensive systems structured acording to the UPML framework and IRS-II integrated the UPML framework with web service technologies. In this paper we describe IRS-III. Within IRS-III we have now incorporated and extended the WSMO ontology. Our extensions to WSMO include the addition of input and output roles to goals and web services and a new type of mediator. As well as summarizing our additions to WSMO we outline the architecture of IRS-III and the associated interfaces

Implementation of Aspect-oriented Business Process Models with Web Services

In software development, crosscutting concerns, such as security, audit, access control, authentication, logging, persistence, transaction, error handling etc. can be modularized using the aspect-oriented paradigm. In busi- ness process modeling, aspects have been used to reduce visualization complexity, increase reuse and improve model maintainability. There are techniques which address aspects in modeling and implementation phases of business process; however, these techniques adopt different semantic representations, hindering the integration of these phases into the BPM lifecycle. This work proposes an architecture for service discovery capable of selecting web services that implement crosscutting concerns and meet the goals established in the aspect modeling phase, executing them accordingly with a prioritization. A proof of concept to analyze the proposed architecture and generated artifacts was performed. Afterwards, the proposal was evaluated by means of an experiment. The results suggest that the def- inition of an operational goal enables the business spe- cialists to concentrate on the modeling of the aspect without necessarily concerning its implementation, since a proper option for implementation is discovered during the execution of the process

An investigation into the implementation issues and challenges of service oriented architecture

Several literatures have been published about the semantic web services being the solution to interoperability challenges within the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework. The aim of this dissertation was to find out, if the introduction of the semantic layer into the SOA infrastructure will actually solve these challenges. In order to determine the existence of these challenges, a traditional web service built on XML technology was developed; first to understand the technology behind web services and secondly to demonstrate the limitations of the original SOA framework especially in the area of automatic service discovery and automatic service composition. To further investigate how the Semantic layer could solve these limitations; a semantic web service was developed, to explore the tools and models available to develop semantic web services and the possible challenges that could arise from the inclusion of the semantic layer into the SOA infrastructure. These two applications were evaluated and compared in terms of their capabilities and underlying technologies to find out if truly, the semantic web services could solve the interoperability challenges within the SOA infrastructure. Since semantic web services are built using ontologies, they have well described interfaces that allow for automatic web service discovery and invocation; it was found out that truly, they can solve the interoperability challenges in the SOA framework. However, there are a number of challenges that could impede the development of the Semantic SOA; such challenges were discussed in this paper. Finally, this paper concludes by highlighting areas in which the work in this research could be extended

Semantic Interoperability Middleware – Enabling collaborative networks in public sector

Electronic Government initiatives, such as seamless public services delivered at one-stop government portals, require establishing collaborative networks among public- and private-sector organizations. However, semantic interoperability problems emerge as these organizations may differ in the terms and meanings they use to communicate, express their needs and describe resources they make available to each other. This paper describes typical semantic interoperability problems and presents a middleware solution to address them, called Semantic Interoperability Middleware (SIM). The paper illustrates the problems through three case studies in a collaborative network for the delivery of welfare benefits. Subsequently, the requirements for SIM are presented, and the architecture and design of the solution are specified using UML. SIM assumes organizations have agreed on ontologies that reflect the meaning of terms they use in communicating. It comprises three services: Mediation – resolves differences in terms and meaning; Validation – detects inconsistent terms and meaning; and Discovery – mediates and matches need with resource descriptions. Finally, the case studies are resolved applying SIM.Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (WISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

SEEMP: A Semantic Interoperability Infrastructure for e-government services in the employment sector

This paper presents SEEMP, a marketplace to coordinate and integrate public and private employment services (ESs) around the EU Member States. The need for flexible collaboration in the marketplace gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a mixed approach that relies on the concepts of services and semantics. SEEMP approach combines Software Engineering and Semantic Web methodologies/tools in an infrastructure that allows for a meaningful service-based communication among ESs

Modeling Services for the Semantic Grid

The Grid has emerged as a new distributed computing infrastructure for ad- vanced science and engineering aiming at enabling sharing of resources and infor- mation towards coordinated problem solving in dynamic environments. Research in Grid Computing and Web Services has recently converged in what is known as the Web Service Resource Framework. While Web Service technologies and standards such as SOAP and WSDL provide the syntactical basis for communi- cation in this framework, a service oriented grid architecture for communication has been defined in the Open Grid Service architecture. Wide agreement that a flexible service Grid is not possible without support by Semantic technologies has lead to the term "Semantic Grid" which is at the moment only vaguely defined. In our ongoing work on the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) we so far concentrated on the semantic description of Web services with respect to applications in Enterprise Application Integration and B2B integration sce- narios. Although the typical application areas of Semantic Web services have slightly different requirements than the typical application scenarios in the Grid a big overlap justifies the assumption that most research results in the Semantic Web Services area can be similarly applied in the Semantic Grid. The present abstract summarizes the authors view on how to fruitfully in- tegrate Semantic Web service technologies around WSMO/WSML and WSMX and Grid technologies in a Semantic Service Grid and gives an outlook on further possible directions and research. The reminder of this abstract is structured as follows. After giving a short overview of the current Grid Service architecture and its particular requirements, we shortly review the basic usage tasks for Semantic Web services. We then point out how these crucial tasks of Semantic Web services are to be addressed by WSMO. In turn, we try to analyze which special requirements for Semantic Web Services arise with respect to the Grid. We conclude by giving an outlook on the limitations of current Semantic Web services technologies and how we plan to address these in the future in a common Framework for Semantic Grid services

IRS-III: A broker-based approach to semantic Web services

A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain