2007
Enabling Semantic Web ServicesThe Web Service Modeling OntologyAuthors:

• Dieter Fensel,
• Holger Lausen,
• Jos de Bruijn,
• Michael Stollberg,
• Dumitru Roman,
• Axel Polleres,
• John Domingue
• …show all 7hide
  

ISBN: 978-3-540-34519-0 (Print) 978-3-540-34520-6  (Online)



Enabling Semantic Web ServicesThe Web Service Modeling Ontology

Fensel, D., Lausen, H., Polleres, A., Bruijn, J., Stollberg, M., Roman, D., Domingue, J.

2007, XIV, 188 p. 41 illus.

ISBN 978-3-540-34520-6

  Immediately available per PDF-download (no DRM, watermarked)

About this book
Service-oriented computing is a newly predominant factor in IT research and development. Web services appear to be the middleware solution of the future for highly interoperable distributed software solutions. In parallel, research on the Semantic Web provides the results required to exploit distributed machine-processable data. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun a number of research projects to combine these research lines into industrial-strength applications.
In Enabling Semantic Web Services, Dieter Fensel and his contributors offer a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of basic technologies and standards of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, they examine WSMO from the fundamentals to possible applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; they also describe its relation to other approaches like OWL-S and WSDL-S.
With many of the related technologies and standards still under development, this book offers an up-to-date conceptual introduction, plus pointers to future application scenarios for researchers in acad

Contents
Part I Foundations
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 TheWorldWideWeb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 The Building Blocks: URIs, HTTP, and HTML . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.3 From HTML to XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.4 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3 The Semantic Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.1 Ontologies and the Semantic Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 The Resource Description Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.3 The Web Ontology Language OWL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.4 Rules for the Semantic Web. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.5 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4 Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.1 Terminology and Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
4.2 The Origins of Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.3 The Web Service Technology Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.4 Web Services in Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.5 What’s Missing in Web Services? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.6 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Part II The Web Service Modeling Ontology
5 Introduction to WSMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.1 WSMO Design Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.2 Top-Level Elements of WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
X Contents
5.3 The Language for Defining WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
6 The Concepts of WSMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
6.1 Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
6.2 Web Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.3 Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
6.4 Mediators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
6.5 Nonfunctional Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6.6 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7 WSML – a Language for WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
7.1 The WSML Layering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
7.2 General WSML Syntax. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.3 WSML Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7.4 WSML Exchange Syntaxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
7.5 Key Features of WSML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
7.6 Relation to RDF(S) and OWL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
7.7 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8 Related Work in the Area of Semantic Web Service
Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.1 OWL-S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.2 SWSF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8.3 WSDL-S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
8.4 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Part III Tools and Applications
9 Semantic Web Service Usage Tasks in WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.1 The Virtual Travel Agency Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
9.2 Discovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
9.3 Mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
9.4 Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
9.5 Grounding and Execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
10 Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
10.1 Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
10.2 Design Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
10.3 Execution Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
10.4 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Contents XI
11 Applications of WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
11.1 E-Commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
11.2 E-Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
11.3 E-Banking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
11.4 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
12 Conclusion and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
12.1 Semantic Web Services Using WSMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
12.2 Standardization Efforts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
12.3 Industrial Collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
12.4 Alternatives to ClassicalWeb Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Authors & Editors
Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel is the scientific director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). His current research interests include Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web Services, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Application Integration, and Electronic Commerce. He has been involved in several national and international research projects, for example, in the IST projects DIP, IBROW, Knowledge Web, On-To-Knowledge, Ontoweb, SWWS, and Wonderweb. He is the project coordinator of dip, Knowledge Web, Ontoknowledge, Ontoweb, and SWWS. He published around 150 papers as books and journals, book, conference, and workshop contributions and won the Carl-Adam-Petri-Award of the Faculty of Economic Sciences from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (2000).

• Reviews
  

From the reviews:
"This book presents a description of the major ideas in this stream of development, and a technically detailed description of the emerging technologies and tools. … The book is a very accessible treatment of this material, intended for readers from a variety of backgrounds." (D. I. Barnard, Computing Reviews, January, 2008)