Semantic web services: facts and fiction
John Mylopoulos, Maria E. Orłowska · 2005
Semantic web services are web services with associated semantic descriptions. These descriptions will make it possible for other programs to select, compose and monitor web services at run-time, thereby contributing to the realization of the Semantic Web vision. Researchers have already been active in making the notion of semantic web service more concrete through usage scenaria and technologies that will support their design and use (e.g., [1]). Software Engineering has grappled with the problem of software design for more than three decades. There is welldocumented evidence that designing software manually is a laborious and error-prone task. Semantic descriptions of software (e.g., requirements and design specifications), developed and used at design-time, can facilitate the process of software construction, but they are not panacea. With semantic web services, we seem to be trying to solve the same software development problem, but now these semantic descriptions are used (for selection, composition, monitoring and other purposes) at run-time, automatically. Can we ever hope to see semantic web service technologies and methodologies that actually work? The discussion will focus on this central theme; it will be structured according to the following questions: