Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison

Abstract. The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions

MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator

The main objective of the MultimediaN E-Culture project is to demonstrate how novel semantic-web and presentation technologies can be deployed to provide better indexing and search support within large virtual collections of cultural-heritage resources. The architecture is fully based on open web standards, in particular XML, SVG, RDF/OWL and SPARQL. One basic hypothesis underlying this work is that the use of explicit background knowledge in the form of ontologies/vocabularies/thesauri is in particular useful in information retrieval in knowledge-rich domains

Integrating Vocabularies: Discovering and Representing Vocabulary Maps

The Semantic Web would enable new ways of doing business on the Web that require development of advanced business document integration technologies performing intelligent document transformation. Th

L.: Reconciling concepts and relations in heterogeneous ontologies

Abstract. In the extensive usage of ontologies envisaged by the Semantic Web there is a compelling need for expressing mappings between the components of heterogeneous ontologies. These mappings are of many different forms and involve the different components of ontologies. State of the art languages for ontology mapping enable to express semantic relations between homogeneous components of different ontologies, namely they allow to map concepts into concepts, individuals into individuals, and properties into properties. Many real cases, however, highlight the necessity to establish semantic relations between heterogeneous components. For example to map a concept into a relation or vice versa. To support the interoperability of ontologies we need therefore to enrich mapping languages with constructs for the representation of heterogeneous mappings. In this paper, we propose an extension of Distributed Description Logics (DDL) to allow for the representation of mapping between concepts and relations. We provide a semantics of the proposed language and show its main logical properties.