On the Integration of Services with the Web of Data

Research on Semantic Web Services has pursued the automation of tasks on the Web by enriching Web services technologies with semantics. Thus far, however, Semantic Web Services have failed to gain a significant uptake due to a big extent to the complexity of the solutions proposed and the limited amount of high quality data and ontologies that were available until recently. In this report we explore the relationship between Semantic Web Services and the Web of Data. We identify the potential benefits that could be obtained by adequately integrating these so far disconnected worlds. We present a vision outlining how this integration could take place by using simpler vocabularies for describing services, through the adoption of linked data principles for publishing services on the Web, and by reusing principles originating research on Knowledge Based Systems and Knowledge Engineering such as the Blackboard model and Problem-Solving Methods. The vision presented herein represents at the same time the outline of a research roadmap we are pursuing and we shall, where appropriate, illustrate some of these ideas through concrete examples and prototypes we have already developed.