Experiment report: "Semantic SOA" - NATO CWID 2008
Bjørn Jervell Hansen, Jonas Halvorsen, Svein Ivar Kristiansen, Rolf Rasmussen · 2008
NATO Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (CWID) is an annual event focusing onimproving the interoperability within the alliance. One of the issues investigated during CWID isthe NATO Network Enabled Capability (NEC), and SemSOA, the Norwegian Defence ResearchEstablishment contribution at CWID 2008, aimed to contribute to NATO NEC by investigatingsemantic service-oriented architecture (SSOA). Loose coupling between services as provided byservice-oriented architecture (SOA) is already a NATO NEC recommendation, and SSOA aims atproviding an even looser coupling using semantic technologies (see Hansen et al. (2007)).SemSOA performed technical tests exploring the following areas where SSOA is envisioned to en-hance SOA: how to describe services (service annotation), how to find services (service discovery),how to utilise services (service invocation), and how to link services together (service orchestration).In addition to this, two more general areas for semantic technology application were investigated:information integration and information fusion.During the experiment, we successfully demonstrated the ability to describe, find, and utilise sev-eral Web services, some of which were provided by other CWID nations, using SSOA principles.Successful application of semantic technologies for information integration and fusion was alsodemonstrated.As this was a technical experiment, ontology modelling was considered outside the experimentscope and simplified auto-generated ontologies were used rather than real-world ontologies. Fur-thermore, it should be noted that currently available SSOA software tools are still to a large extentexperimental and immature and thus limits the available tool support. Extensive software support isa prerequisite for a more widespread use of semantic technologies.Semantic interoperability is a visionary goal overarching a large number of ongoing initiatives inthe NATO research and information technology communities. In the information infrastructure ofthe future there will be obvious needs for technical solutions that contribute to semantic interop-erability, but more research and development is needed before it is recommendable to include thetechnology of SemSOA in fielded systems. However, the underlying principles of this experimenthave been shown to be very much valid, indicating that SSOA has the potential to add value to futureinformation system solutions.