News Story

Interoperability of Major Semantic Web Service Platforms

John Domingue, Friday 20 Aug 2004

Over the last few days visitors from a team based at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute located in Galway and Innsbruck have been working on making their semantic web services platform, WSMX, interoperate with KMi’s Internet Reasoning Service (IRS). Today they completed their work so that each platform is now able to invoke semantic web services on the other. In the last few years web services have attracted enormous interest from both industry and academia as a way to make reusable computational resources available over the internet. The potential market for web services is predicted to be worth billions of dollars. However, currently applications based on web services have to be created through a laborious manual process which involves finding appropriate services and plugging them together. Semantic web services promise to automate or semi-automate the application building process so that eventually a request from a user to “Book a holiday somewhere warm, by the sea with a bit of culture” will be translated into invocations of appropriate airline, hotel, long range weather forecast and tourist web services. A volume of research papers have been published in the area of semantic web services but to date relatively few tools have been produced. The completion of today’s work will form the basis for extensive collaboration between the teams behind the only software platforms able to completely handle the creation, deployment and use of semantic web services.