Archive

Web Services standards, under development in the W3C Web Services Activity and other organizations, make up an integrated technology stack that Web applications developers can rely on to ensure interoperability. From the beginning, some research has been conducted to meet particular needs in this area, such as registering resources or services, discovering resources or services on the Web, composing a service by using several other services, etc. The early solutions consist of using Web agents, often using pre-defined directories, sometimes simply crawling the Web.
In parallel, starting from the need for metadata in resources, the W3C Semantic Web Activity has developed the initial building blocks of the Semantic Web technologies: the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The W3C Semantic Web Services Interest Group has shown a strong interest in having more integrated semantics inside the Web Services stack, and also provides evidence of a rich variety of research proceeding in this area. This work aims towards the general objective of a more comprehensive, more expressive framework for describing all aspects of services, which can enable more powerful tools and fuller automation of a broad range of Web services activities.
Recently, during the Constraints and Capabilities Workshop, proposals including Semantic Web technologies have already been discussed, in the light of requirements for expressing policies for Web Services. We now aim at looking into a generic extensible framework based on Semantic Web technologies, to support longer-term objectives, while continuing to develop immediate solutions for the most pressing Web Services requirements. The OWL-S submission has already demonstrated interest in this approach. Integration to the Web Services stack, and also in the Web architecture, should be key properties of such a framework.
The intent of the workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services is to provide advice to W3C on possible future work in the area, in particular the creation of a Working Group.

Semantic Web Services aim to combine Semantic Web technology with Web Services, thereby providing an integrated solution for realising the vision of the Semantic Web. By using ontologies as the semantic data model for Web Service technologies this ensures adoption of the Semantic Web. Furthermore, semantically enhanced information processing allows development of high quality techniques for automated discovery, composition, contracting, and execution control for Web Services, thus enabling the promise of Web Services to become a reality.

The 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference was held in Heraklion, Crete May 29-June 1, 2005. It presented the latest results in research and application in semantic web technologies (including knowledge markup languages, semantic web services, ontology management and more).
ESWC 2005 also featured a special industry-oriented event providing European industry with an opportunity to become even more familiar with these technologies. It offered a tutorial program, focusing on the latest in semantic web technologies.
ESWC 2005 was co-located with a meeting of the Knowledge Web network of excellence. Workshops and meetings of other European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects involved in the semantic web and semantic web technologies were able to showcase their developments.
ESWC 2005 was sponsored by SDK, a group of three European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects known as SEKT, DIP and Knowledge Web. Together these projects aim to improve world-wide research and standardisation in the area of the Semantic Web.

Semantic Web Services are the next step in bringing the web to its full potential, after adding semantics to the static web. Web services can significantly increase the Web architecture's potential, by providing a way of automated program communication and discovery of services. This can be achieved by adding semantic annotations to the description of the component interfaces already available via standard technologies like WSDL, SOAP and UDDI.
Recently, a new major initiative (
WSMO) has started in this area which has attracted a lot of attention. WSMO is an ontology for different aspects of Semantic Web Services aiming at solving the integration problem. The joint working groups around this initiative are developing a proper formalisation language for semantic web services and providing (
WSML) and developing a reference implementation of WSMO (
WSMX).
The objective of this workshop is to discuss different implementations related to WSMO, and to gain insight in problems related to implementing WSMO. We welcome papers on related topics and demonstrations of prototypes or deployed applications.

Semantic Web Services are the next step in bringing the web to its full potential, after adding semantics to the static web. Web services can significantly increase the Web architecture's potential, by providing a way of automated program communication and discovery of services. This can be achieved by adding semantic annotations to the description of the component interfaces already available via standard technologies like WSDL, SOAP and UDDI.
Recently, a new major initiative (WSMO) has started in this area which has attracted a lot of attention. WSMO is an ontology for different aspects of Semantic Web Services aiming at solving the integration problem. The joint working groups around this initiative are developing a proper formalisation language for semantic web services and providing (WSML) and developing a reference implementation of WSMO (WSMX).
The objective of this workshop is to discuss different implementations related to WSMO, and to gain insight in problems related to implementing WSMO. We welcome papers on related topics and demonstrations of prototypes or deployed applications.

This workshop on FOAF, social networking and the Semantic Web provides a first chance to discuss the unusual combination of perspectives - academic and scientific, engineering, social, legal and business - drawn together by these trends. The workshop aims to bring together for the first time researchers interested in the effects, analysis and application of social networks on the (Semantic) Web as well as practitioners building applications and infrastructure. The workshop will also try to give a snapshot of current developments, as well as setting a roadmap for the future of both FOAF and social networking - especially in the context of the Semantic Web.

Various communities have taken advantage of the current Web functionalities to strengthen the communication and information exchange not only within the community, but also with external communities or individual users. Miscellaneous web portals have appeared with the purpose of providing an open and effective communication forum for their members. Nevertheless, current Web technology presents serious limitations to make information efficiently accessible for users. Moreover, users face the task of reading the documents retrieved in order to extract the information desired. These limitations naturally appear in existing Web communities based on this technology, making information searching, accessing, extracting, interpreting and processing a difficult and time-consuming task. In this context, Semantic Web technologies can considerably improve the information sharing process, overcoming the problems found in current Web communities to search, access, extract, interpret and process information. In this sense, Web communities based on Semantic Web technologies represent a natural evolution of existing Web communities. The workshop will provide a forum for workers in the fields of knowledge engineering, knowledge management, knowledge representation, language technology, ontological engineering, data, text and web mining and Semantic Web, to present their latest results and to discuss the potential joint application of these fields to Web communities, both analysing what has been achieved so far and what are the next steps to accomplish. The aim is to provide a snapshot of the state of the art and guidelines for further steps.

The goal of our approach is to make web services a mature technology. This is a pre-requisite for their application in mission-critical applications. Businesses can be released from the burden of complex, slow and expensive software integration and focus instead on the value of their offerings and mission-critical tasks. Then the Internet will become a global common platform where organizations and individuals communicate with each other to carry out various commercial activities and to provide value-added services. Ultimately, virtual enterprises and supply-chains are automatically established, allowing enterprises to be more reactive and more effective.