Modeling Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web services promise to automate tasks such as discovery, mediation, selection, composition, and invocation of services, enabling fully flexible automated e-business. Their usage, however, still requires a significant amount of human intervention due to the lack of support for a machine-processable description. In this book, Jos de Bruijn and his coauthors lay the foundations for understanding the requirements that shape the description of the various aspects related to Semantic Web services, such as the static background knowledge in the form of ontologies, the functional description of the service, and the behavioral description of the service. They introduce the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), which provides means for describing the functionality and behavior of Web services, as well as the underlying business knowledge, in the form of ontologies, with a conceptual grounding in the Web Service Modeling Ontology. Academic and industrial researchers as well as professionals will find a comprehensive overview of the concepts and challenges in the area of Semantic Web services, the Web Services Modeling Language and its relation to the Web Services Modeling Ontology, and an in-depth treatment of both enabling technologies and theoretical foundations.

Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.

Semantics, Web services, and Web processes promise better re-use, universal interoperability and integration. Semantics has been recognized as the primary tool to address the challenges of a broad spectrum of heterogeneity and for improving automation through machine understandable descriptions. Semantic Web Services, Processes and Applications brings contributions from researchers who study, explore and understand the semantic enabling of all phases of semantic Web processes. This encompasses design, annotation, discovery, choreography and composition. Also this book presents fundamental capabilities and techniques associated with ontological modeling or services, annotation, matching and mapping, and reasoning. This is complemented by discussion of applications in e-Government and bioinformatics. Special bulk rates are available for course adoption through Publishing Editor.

Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.

A paradigm shift is taking place in computer science: one generation ago, we learned to abstract from hardware to software, now we are abstracting from software to serviceware implemented through service-oriented computing. Yet ensuring interoperability in open, heterogeneous, and dynamically changing environments, such as the Internet, remains a major challenge for actual machine-to-machine integration. Usually significant problems in aligning data, processes, and protocols appear as soon as a specific piece of functionality is used within a different application context. The Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach is about describing services with metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination, and use. Fensel and his coauthors provide a comprehensive overview of SWS in line with actual industrial practice. They introduce the main sociotechnological components that ground the SWS vision (like Web Science, Service Science, and service-oriented architectures) and several approaches that realize it, e.g. the Web Service Modeling Framework, OWL-S, and RESTful services. The real-world relevance is emphasized through a series of case studies from large-scale R&D projects and a business-oriented proposition from the SWS technology provider Seekda. Each chapter of the book is structured according to a predefined template, covering both theoretical and practical aspects, and including walk-through examples and hands-on exercises. Additional learning material is available on the book website www.swsbook.org. With its additional features, the book is ideally suited as the basis for courses or self-study in this field, and it may also serve as a reference for researchers looking for a state-of-the-art overview of formalisms, methods, tools, and applications related to SWS.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL, Second Edition, discusses the capabilities of Semantic Web modeling languages, such as RDFS (Resource Description Framework Schema) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). Organized into 16 chapters, the book provides examples to illustrate the use of Semantic Web technologies in solving common modeling problems. It uses the life and works of William Shakespeare to demonstrate some of the most basic capabilities of the Semantic Web. The book first provides an overview of the Semantic Web and aspects of the Web. It then discusses semantic modeling and how it can support the development from chaotic information gathering to one characterized by information sharing, cooperation, and collaboration. It also explains the use of RDF to implement the Semantic Web by allowing information to be distributed over the Web, along with the use of SPARQL to access RDF data. Moreover, the reader is introduced to components that make up a Semantic Web deployment and how they fit together, the concept of inferencing in the Semantic Web, and how RDFS differs from other schema languages. Finally, the book considers the use of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) to manage vocabularies by taking advantage of the inferencing structure of RDFS-Plus. This book is intended for the working ontologist who is trying to create a domain model on the Semantic Web. Updated with the latest developments and advances in Semantic Web technologies for organizing, querying, and processing information, including SPARQL, RDF and RDFS, OWL 2.0, and SKOS Detailed information on the ontologies used in today's key web applications, including ecommerce, social networking, data mining, using government data, and more Even more illustrative examples and case studies that demonstrate what semantic technologies are and how they work together to solve real-world problems

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business. Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services. Semantic Web Technologies: Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies. Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability. Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation. Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation. Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.

"This book addresses how we can make the Web more useful, more intelligent, more knowledge intensive to fulfill our more and more demanding learning and working needs? It is based on the premise that representing knowledge visually is key for individuals and organizations to enable useful access to the knowledge era"--Provided by publisher.