Semantic Web Services and Semantic Service-Oriented Architectures

摘要

The DoD is moving toward a Web services-based net-centric service- oriented architecture. A critical part of this effort will be the ability to discover, invoke and compose Web services in response to warfighter needs. Currently, discovery involves manual keyword search of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry to find the appropriate Web service and its Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document. The WSDL specifies the syntactic description of how to invoke the Web service, but semantics (meaning) are needed to describe its function. The semantic Web is an evolution of the Web in which semantics of information and services are defined, allowing machines to better understand and satisfy user requests. An ontology can be defined as a set of classes, attributes (properties), and relationships among class members - with which to model a knowledge domain. Communities of interest are developing domain-specific ontologies. Semantic Web services can use these representations to describe the operations, inputs and outputs of Web services promising to pave the way for computers to discover, invoke and compose Web services with significantly less manual effort and programming. This report highlights the current approaches for developing semantic Web services.