Discussion: OWL-S and Industry Adoption

Last week I attended a semantic web seminar hosted by Eric Miller, who is a Semantic Web Activity Lead for the W3C, and we started to discuss the future of OWL-S and why it seemed that the industry (chiefly commercial interests) have been slow to adopt semantic web services.  By "slow" we were comparing how OWL-S does not seem to have the same transition from more of a research/academic initiative to more commercial implemenations as seen with RDF and OWL.  As such we figured it would be best to open up a discussion as to why this is, and how to spur the transition as well as to allow people to comment freely on OWL-S.  Here is a list a questions and statements that may help jumpstart the conversation:

This OWL-S standard is still a W3C submission.  Is it still to early to discuss the viability of OWL-S before it becomes a recommendation?  Perhaps many are still trying to digest the specifications?

Are there not enough concrete examples/documentation for users to follow, and help expose the benefit of semantically describing a web service?

Are the good examples that do exist not given enough publicity, and a convenient way to search for them?

Are there not enough tools to help automate the process of semantically describing a web service?

Are there other standards or emerging technologies that overlap with OWL-S, and lessen its importance?


These are just a few questions to start on, but please feel free to comment on any aspect of this topic.  The goal is to create some excitement, and realization of the importance of OWL-S.  Thanks for your time, and thoughts

Josh Grob
BBN Technologies
Software Engineer
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA 02138