Semantic Web services, processes and applications and Semantic Web and semantic Web services

The Web, as we know it, is a collection of human readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs. For that reason, it has been called the “eyeball” Web. While the Web emerged as a World Wide repository of digitized information, by and large, the very same information is not available for automatic computation. In recent years two parallel efforts emerged that have the potential of overcoming this paradox: the first effort is the Semantic Web which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content of Web pages; the second effort is the development of Web Services which results in a Web where programs act as independent agents to become the producers and consumers of information and enable automation of business transactions.In this talk I will focus on research that attempts to bridge the gap between the Web as we know it, the Semantic Web and Web services. Under this approach, I propose the vision of Web services as autonomous goal-directed agents which select other agents to interact with, and flexibly negotiate their interaction model, acting at times in client server mode, or at other times in peer to peer mode. The resulting Web services, that I call Autonomous Semantic Web services, utilize ontologies and semantically annotated Web pages to automate the fulfillment of tasks and transactions with other Web agents. In particular, Autonomous Semantic Web services use the Semantic Web to support capability based discovery and interoperation at run time. A first step towards this vision is the development of formal languages and inference mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core concepts of Web services. DAML-S (the Darpa Agent Markup Language for Services) is the first attempt to define such a language. I will give a brief overview of DAML-S and its relations with the Semantic Web and Web services. In addition, I will provide concrete examples of computational models of how DAML-S can be viewed as the first step in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and current proposed industry standards for Web services. I will provide concrete examples of DAML-S in action, discuss challenges still open in the bridging between the Semantic Web and Web services and provide a roadmap to get us from today’s Web to the Web of autonomous Semantic Web services.KeywordsFormal LanguageCore ConceptDigitize InformationAutomatic ComputationBusiness TransactionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore useful Semantic Web technologies and ontology-based applications for digital libraries. It also investigates the perceptions of university librarians and academicians in Pakistan about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory research design based on Delphi research strategy was conducted to answer the research questions. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 50 key informants including university librarians and academicians to explore their perceptions about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries. Thematic analysis of interview data was conducted to obtain results.FindingsThe results of this paper showed that DuraCloud, Semantic information mashup, OntoEdit and resource description framework (RDF) are the various Semantic Web applications which are useful for digital libraries to develop semantic relationships among digital contents and increase their accessibility in the web environment. Findings revealed that Semantic Web provides precise results and meets user information needs in an effective way. Results also showed that next-generation digital libraries use context-awareness technology, intelligent agent software and detecting sensors to analyze user information needs and provide dynamic information services. This paper recommended that librarians should embrace the use of emerging web technologies in libraries and offer library services through the medium of the web.Practical implicationsThis paper envisaged the future of digital library services and Semantic Web applications that can be used to re-structure metadata of digital library. This paper has practical implications for librarians to consider the useful applications of Semantic Web for digital library and enhance the interoperability of metadata among heterogeneous information systems. Practically, results obtained from this paper are highly useful for library schools and LIS teachers to up-date their curriculum by incorporating new contents related to web languages and Semantic Web applications for digital libraries.Originality/valueThis paper identifies various Semantic Web applications which are useful for developing Semantic Digital Libraries.

It's easy to see how, in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, a five-day discussion of connectivity and information sharing could be read as a metaphor for a new era of social openness and understanding. That said, the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference held in May in Budapest, Hungary nonetheless focused largely on nuts and bolts, with tracks devoted to rising trends in electronic security, data mining, and e-commerce. But the most intriguing of the tracks might well have been those about the Semantic Web, Semantic Web services, and the connections between them. The Semantic Web remains in its infancy, but the technologies behind it could still promise to dramatically rewrite the way the Internet operates in the coming years.

Semantic Web Services are the key technology providing services for the users' convenience in the semantic web environment. Many companies in various fields are researching and developing languages for constructing Semantic Web Services such as DAML-S, WSDL, X-LANG and BPEL4WS. DAML-S is a method that accesses the existing Web Service method from a semantic web environment. However, the current Semantic Web Services Discovery System does not provide sufficient processing of quality factors (performance, accessibility, availability, reliability and transaction) nor reliable and accurate service results desired by the user through a UDDi search method. The present study analyzes the disadvantages of the current web services and suggests a Semantic Web Services Discovery System based on QoS applying semantic web technologies as a solution to the problems. The suggested system provides a UDDi and DAML-S based discovery engine to allow efficient web service discovery and composition.

Semantic Web Services research has gained momentum over the last few Years and by now several realizations exist. They are being used in a number of industrial use-cases. Soon software developers will be expected to use this infrastructure to build their B2B applications requiring dynamic integration. However, there is still a lack of guidelines for the evaluation of tools developed to realize Semantic Web Services and applications built on top of them. In normal software engineering practice such guidelines can already be found for traditional component-based systems. Also some efforts are being made to build performance models for servicebased systems. Drawing on these related efforts in component-oriented and servicebased systems, we identified the need for a generic evaluation model for Semantic Web Services applicable to any realization. The generic evaluation model will help users and customers to orient their systems and solutions towards using Semantic Web Services. In this chapter, we have presented the requirements for the generic evaluation model for Semantic Web Services and further discussed the initial steps that we took to sketch such a model. Finally, we discuss related activities for evaluating semantic technologies.

Firstly, this paper expounded that the traditional searching based on keywords has a severe deficiency on Recall and Precision because the computer can't understand what information mean efficiently. In Succession, through extending from ordinary information to Geo-spatial information, on the support of geo-ontology theory and semantic web services technology, this paper discussed the principle, methods and application of ontology-driven geo-spatial information retrieving mechanism in semantic web. In other word, How to structure the framework for running this mechanism, how to build the ontology information models and how to establish the ontology-driven services models are discussed in detail in context. A design of systems for implementing the mechanism and experiment are given at the end of the text.

Semantic Web Services promise seamless interoperability of data and applications on a semantic level, thus turning the Web from a world-wide information repository for human consumption only to a device of distributed computation. To this end, appropriate semantic descriptions of Web services and intelligent mechanisms working on this need a solid foundation in terms of the underlying semantically-enabled communication technologies. Recent advances in middleware technologies propose semantics-aware tuplespaces as an instrument for coping with the arising requirements of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamism. An additional argument is that Semantic Web Services have inherited the communication model of XML-based Web services, which is based on message exchange, thus being a priori incompatible with the REST architectural model of the Web. Analogously to the conventional Web, truly Web-compliant service communication should be based on persistent publication instead of message passing. In this chapter, we present “Triple Space computing”, a Triple Space-based coordination middleware for Semantic Web Services. We take a closer look at the respective data, infrastructure and coordination models that enable the management of formal knowledge and that support the interaction patterns characteristic for the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. Applying Triple Space computing to Semantic Execution Environments and Service-Oriented Infrastructures is the second main topic of this chapter.

This chapter explores the ongoing efforts to integrate Web services and the Semantic Web for the purposes of sharing knowledge, enabling access to services, and application integration in distributed clinical environments. Combining the Semantic Web and Web services in relation to the healthcare domain, results in Semantic Web services for healthcare, which will enable intelligent interpretation of healthcare data by services such as clinical decision support systems. Critical issues in ontology standardization and security are discussed. The multi-disciplinary problem of service composition is presented with emphasis on the role healthcare experts play in identifying value-added medical services.

The convergence of the Semantic Web and Grid technologies has resulted in the Semantic Grid. The great effort devoted in by the Semantic Web community to achieve the semantic markup of Web services (what we call Semantic Web Services) has yielded many markup technologies and initiatives, from which the Semantic Grid technology should benefit as, in recent years, it has become Web service-oriented. Keeping this fact in mind, our first premise in this work is to reuse the ODESWS Framework for the Knowledge-based markup of Grid services. Initially ODESWS was developed to enable users to annotate, design, discover and compose Semantic Web Services at the Knowledge Level. But at present, if we want to reuse it for annotating Grid services, we should carry out a detailed study of the characteristics of Web services and Grid services and thus, we will learn where they differ and why. Only when this analysis is performed should we know how to extend our theoretical framework for describing Grid services. Finally, we present the ODESGS Framework, which is the result of having applied the extensions identified to the aforementioned Semantic Web Services description framework.

Semantic web has emerged as a web of next generation providing has various opportunities to enhance the over all performance of current web. The objective of this paper is to review the literature and to provide a critical evaluation of semantic application in the domains of e-business and telecommunications. Literature review reveals that a simple solution to the current e-business problem is solved by purposing a wrapper layer above the current state of the art technologies. We emphasize that telecommunication is one the strong area of research for semantic web implementation. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis for using semantic technologies in telecom sector is found effective to make better decision, and business to business integration on the basis of intelligent semantic web services.

Services are an increasingly important part of the Web, and they are a necessary component of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web Services (SWS) are a research effort towards automation of the use of Web services, enhancing existing SOA capabilities with intelligent and automated integration. Recently, we have introduced WSMO-Lite, a lightweight service ontology intended for semantic annotations of the Web Service Description Language WSDL. In contrast to preceding SWS frameworks such as OWL-S and WSMO, WSMO-Lite simplifies the semantic descriptions and enables bottom-up semantic annotation of Web services, but very importantly, it also relaxes the requirements on completeness of semantic descriptions, which enables building incremental layers of semantics on top of existing service descriptions. In this work, we describe various useful subsets of the extent of semantic annotation on Web services with respect to the requirements of SWS automation tasks; and we detail the means of validating SWS descriptions with flexible levels of strictness.

Existing approaches to Semantic Web Services (SWS) require a domain ontology and a semantic description of the service. In the case of lightweight SWS approaches, such as SAWSDL, service description is achieved by semantically annotating existing web service interfaces. Other approaches such as OWL-S and WSMO describe services in a separate ontology. So, existing approaches separate service description from domain description, therefore increasing design efforts. We propose EXPRESS a lightweight approach to SWS that requires the domain ontology definition only. Its simplicity stems from the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web such as resource realization, self describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource's semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for ontologically describing services. We provide an example that illustrates EXPRESS and then discuss how it compares to SA-REST and WSMO.

With the semantic Web and Web services we have potential technologies to develop architectures that support the broad integration of business processes. A growing number of standards like BPEL or WSCI enable us to develop integrated business process architectures on a corporate as well as on an industrywide level. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) permit us to develop new generations of integrated business applications from reusable components and along structures that represent mundane as well as sophisticated business processes. However, experiences in business process modeling show that developing Web services and the corresponding orchestration layer is quite challenging. The coexistence of semantic Web standards and natural language could help to lower the language barrier in design and orchestration, allowing even non-tech people to be involved in application design. Translating natural language descriptions into the semantics of the respective SOA can help to facilitate and fasten the design process.

Semantic Web Services (SWS) are an important part of the Semantic Web, traditionally focused on discovery and composition of e-services. In the area of e-commerce services, it is necessary to go past the granularity of service discovery and also to consider discovering the actual offers provided by a service. Nevertheless, Semantic Web Services research has only recently started to consider offer discovery. In this paper, we present a solution for offer discovery that uses WSMO-Lite, the new lightweight semantic Web service annotation framework.

An weighted ontology-based semantic similarity algorithm for web service