Semantic Web Services

Lecture

Abstract

“Web services” is the name for an important set of technologies for developing large-scale distributed systems, under the umbrella of Service-oriented architectures (SOA). Semantic Web services are building on top of Web services technology by describing various aspects of services using explicit, machine-understandable semantics that enable a certain degree of automation for various service related tasks. This lecture will give an overview of Semantic Web Services technologies. It starts by introducing the principles of Web and Service sciences along with the various technologies that are used by Web services. A set of Semantic Web Services frameworks, including both top-down and bottom-up approaches are then discussed. Finally an overview of applications of semantic technologies in service-oriented systems is provided.

1. Introduction

This lecture provides an introduction to the subject of Semantic Web services. It starts by presenting the two underlying technologies i.e. Web services and Semantic Web and then discusses the vision of Semantic Web services, its architecture and elements.

2. Web Science

This lecture is an introduction to Web Science. It starts presenting the evolution of the Web, beginning with the traditional Web, also know as Web1.0, followed by social web solutions that form the Web2.0 and finishes with Semantic Web also know as Web3.0. This lecture also discusses what Web Science could be by focusing on reasoning on the Web.

3. Service Science

This lecture presents and motivates Service Science. The notion of service and Web service are introduced and discussed. The lecture focuses also on architectural style based on services, namely SOA and its extension with semantics also known as SESA.

4. Web services

This lecture describes the fundamental concepts behind the notion of WSDL based Web services and present them as the natural evolution of conventional middleware. The related Web services standards e.g. WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, WS-Policy, WS-BPEL are examined in details.

5. Web2.0 services

This lecture presents an alternative technology to WSDL-based services presented in the previous lecture, namely Web2.0 / RESTful services. It first introduces the REST principles and goes on presenting the core Web2.0 technologies HTTP, XML, JASON, AJX and WADL.

6. Semantic Web

This lecture provides an introduction to the subject of Semantic Web: the basics and the history of the Web, its limitations, and the vision of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web architecture and its main technologies RDF, OWL, SPARQL and RIF are also discussed.

7. The Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO)

This lecture provides an overview of Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), a conceptual model for Semantic Web Services. WSMO design principles and all its elements (e.g. goal, web service, ontology, mediators) are discussed in details.

8. The Web Service Modeling Language (WSML)

This lecture provides an overview of Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), a family of formal languages that can be used to describe various aspects of Semantic Web Services that follow the WSMO model. The five variants of WSML, namely WSML-Core, WSML-DL, WSML-Flight, WSML-Rule and WSML-Full are discussed in details.

9. The Web Service Modeling Environment (WSMX)

This lecture introduces the Web Service Execution Environment, shorty WSMX. WSMX is a middleware for WSMO-based Semantic Web Services. The lecture introduces the design principles of WSMX and describes the its architecture and components together with its execution semantics.

10. OWL-S and others

This lecture discusses alternative approaches for modeling frameworks and execution environments for Semantic Web Services, including OWL-S, METEOR-S, SWSF and IRS-III

11. Lightweight Annotations

This lecture introduces lightweight approaches for adding semantic annotations to services. It starts by discussing the languages available at service description layer, namely WSDL and hRESTS, continues with the lightweight approaches for adding semantic annotations to them, SAWSDL for WSDL and MicroWSMO for hRESTS and finally presents a lightweight service ontology inspired by the WSMO framework, namely WSMO-Lite.

12. Applications

This lecture presents a selection use cases for Semantic Web Services from two successful European research projects, namely Data Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services (DIP), Semantics Utilized for Process management within and between Enterprises(SUPER) and one successful company that use Semantic Web Services technologies in their products, namely seekda.

13. Mobile Services

This lecture provides an overview on one hand of existing approaches for designing mobile applications and services, and on the other hand of existing mobile platforms.

Slides

Wikipedia

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Services
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Science
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Services
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery_and_Integration
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSMO
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OWL-S

Links

• webscience.org
• w3.org/TR/wsdl20
• w3.org/TR/soap12
• uddi.xml.org
• linkeddata.org
• www.wsmo.org/TR/d2/v1.3/
• www.wsmo.org/wsml
• sws-challenge.org
• w3.org/TR/sawsdl
• dip.semanticweb.org
• www.ip-super.org
• seekda.com

Further reading

• D. Fensel, F. Facca, E. Simperl and I.Toma. Semantic Web Services Textbook, Springer, 2011 (to appear).
• D. Fensel, J. Domingue, J.A. Hendler (editors). Handbook of Semantic Web Technologies, Springer, 2010 (to appear).
• D. Fensel, M. Kerrigan, and M. Zaremba (eds.). Implementing Semantic Web Services - The SESA Framework, Springer, 2008. ISBN: 978-3-540-77019-0
• D. Fensel, C. Bussler. The Web Service Modeling Framework WSMF, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 1(2): 113-137, 2002
• T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, K. O’Hara, N. Shadbolt, D. Weitzner (2006): A Framework for Web Science. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13347/
• D. Fensel, Dieter F. van Harmelen. Unifying Reasoning and Search to Web Scale, IEEE Internet Computing, 11(2), 2007
• G. Alonso, F. Casati, H. Kuno, V. Machiraju. Web Services, Concepts Architectures and Applications. Springer Verlag ISBN 3-540-44008-9
• T. Erl, SOA Principles of Service Design, Prentice Hall 2007 ISBN: 0132344823
• R. T. Fielding, R. N. Taylor. (2002-05), "Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture”, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) (New York: Association for Computing Machinery) 2 (2): 115–150
• T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, O. Lassila. The Semantic Web, Scientific American, 2001.
• D. Fensel. Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce, 2nd Edition, Springer 2003
• D. Fensel, H. Lausen, A. Polleres, J. de Bruijn, M. Stollberg, D. Roman, and J. Domingue. Enabling Semantic Web Services - The Web Service Modeling Ontology. Springer, 2006.
• J. de Bruijn, D. Fensel, U. Keller, M. Kerrigan, H. Lausen, and J. Scicluna. Modeling Semantic Web Services - The Web Service Modeling Language. Springer, 2008
• D. Martin, et al., OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services, W3C Member Submission 22 November 2004,www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S.
• J. Kopecky , T. Vitvar , C. Bournez , J. Farrell: SAWSDL: Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE CS Press, 2007, 11 (6).

Tutorial

Abstract

The aim of this seminar (PS) is to further explore the topics discussed in the Semantic Web Services lectures by answering questions and solving problems directly related to Web services, Semantic Annotations for Services, service related tasks, etc. The seminar follows closely the lecture's material. Exercise sheets will be handed out each week. Students will present their solutions the following week.

Tutorials