News Story

First AKT Sponsored Workshop on Semantic Web Services

John Domingue, Thursday 9 Dec 2004

Yesterday saw 60 researchers from academia and industry come to KMi for the first AKT sponsored workshop on semantic web services. The purpose of the one day workshop was to bring together relevant members of the AKT project and the wider research community associated with semantic web services. Web services are reusable program components which can be invoked over the internet through an XML based interface and, as such, have attracted considerable interest from both academia and industry. Industrial interest has focused on using web services for enterprise wide application integration and as a baseline for implementing business processes. Research in semantic web services aims to apply semantic web technology to automate or semi-automate the tasks associated with the construction and deployment of web service based applications. More specifically, to support the tasks of discovery, mediation, composition and invocation. Ten papers were presented in the morning including four from KMi researchers. The afternoon began with the panel Which Semantic Web Service Standards?? where panellists described the strengths and weaknesses of approaches based on activities related to OWL-S, SWSI, WSMO and the IRS. After the panel session the majority of the afternoon was dedicated to focused discussion groups on the areas associated with mediation, composition, semantic descriptions of web services and on the relationship between semantic web services and the MIAKT Grid project. The workshop closed with a demo session where participants were able to examine a number of semantic web service related tools in detail. The workshop attracted considerable interest both from within the AKT project and from external researchers. In addition to our AKT partners, the workshop had participants from British Telecom, De Montfort University, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at Innsbruck, Essex County Council, Hewlett-Packard, Leicester University, Universidad Politï¿½cnica de Madrid, the University of Manchester, and the University of Karlsruhe.