FYI... Semantic Web Services: Past, Present, and Future - Technical Panel at DWP 2005 @ ICSOC 2005

(Apologies for cross postings)

Hi,

fyi...

Details here => http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/meteor-s/dwp2005/ 
index.php?page=7 <= and pasted below for your convenience

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Semantic Web Services: Past, Present, and Future
Technical Panel, Dynamic Web Processes (DWP) 2005 Workshop
In conjunction with
International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC) 2005

Amsterdam, The Netherlands , December 12th, 2005

Abstract and Motivations

Semantic Web Services (SWS) promise to facilitate all aspects of Web  
services usages. The overarching goals of the various SWS efforts are  
to provide some level of automation of Web services discovery,  
selection, invocation, and composition. Indeed, early efforts, e.g.,  
OWL-S, have demonstrated results such as dynamically matchmaking and  
composing Web services using a service ontology that includes  
descriptions of the services capabilities and needs of the service  
consumer. Other early efforts, e.g., METEOR-S, developed a broad  
framework of semantics that can be added to Web services to  
facilitate their use.

Though decent progress has been achieved, we are far from completely  
realizing all of the aforementioned goals and gaining wide  
acceptance. There remain various challenges and questions to be  
addressed. Recently, newer efforts, i.e., WSMO, SWSF/FLOWS, and WSDL- 
S, have emerged taking at times a different approach to adding  
semantics to Web services. Since none of the efforts have been widely  
adopted (so far) and Web services themselves are facing some  
challenges from simpler alternatives such as REST and some of the Web  
2.0 initiatives; we maybe at a juncture where some discussions and  
sharing of lessons learned may be needed to galvanize the SWS efforts  
and community, as well as to give some directions for future research  
and approaches.

Building on a successful ONTOLOG-forum SWS panel on October 10th,  
2005 , this panel brings together various leaders from the major SWS  
initiatives and community, from both academia and industry. After a  
short introduction and presentation from each initiative, we intend  
to engage in a debate and discussion that will include the following  
(but not limited to) topics and questions:

1.  How can the complexity of the current SWS approaches be reduced  
to help gain some wider adoption?  After all, the primary goal of the  
SWS efforts is to facilitate the usage of Web services.

2.  Is a folksonomy-type approach a better, more realistic,  
alternative to adding semantics to Web services? (similar to efforts  
like http://del.icio.us and Yahoo! Flickr)

3.  Should the SWS community take a pragmatic approach to adding  
semantics to Web services by heavily leveraging and extending the  
existing Web services stack as was done with WSDL-S? Or, is that a  
flawed approach since it inherits any limitations of the stack?

4.  Should the SWS community agree on some basic standards and help  
extend and improve the current Web services stack?  And what are  
advantages and disadvantages?

5.  What are some of the low-hanging fruits that the SWS community  
should strive for first and progressively address the vision  
questions? What are some basic use-cases (e.g., semi-automated Web  
services usages with human in the loop and automated Web services  
usages via software agents)?

6.  Should SWS ontology annotation be limited to OWL-type, FOL DL- 
type languages? Or, should we look into adopting other languages for  
ontology/taxonomy constructions, e.g., UML?

7.  Can formal approaches like FLOWS, which provides complete  
semantics of processes, help the implementation of use cases and  
achieve results that demonstrate clear advantages for businesses over  
well accepted languages like BPEL? What are some example use cases  
that show these advantages?  Or should such formal approaches instead  
leverage and extend languages like BPEL?

8.  What have we learned from current efforts that should drive the  
SWS roadmap?

Date, Time, and Location

Monday December 12th, 2005

3:20PM to 4:20PM

The Mercure Hotel, Amsterdam , the Netherlands

Panelists

John Domingue
Deputy Director, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Milton  
Keynes , UK

Massimo Paolucci
Senior Researcher, NTT DoCoMo Euro Labs, Munich , Germany

Amit Sheth
Professor and CTO, University of Georgia and Semagix, Inc., Athens, USA

Sheila McIlraith
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of  
Toronto, Canada

Francisco ( Paco) Curbera (tentative)
Research Staff Member and Manager, Web Services and Component- 
Oriented Software, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne , NY , USA

Organizers and Acknowledgements

E. Michael (Max) Maximilien (moderator)
Research Staff Member, Almaden Services Research, IBM >Almaden  
Research Center, San Jose , CA , USA

Kunal Verma
Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia, LSDIS Lab, Athens, USA

Amit Sheth

David Martin
Senior Computer Scientist, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI  
International, Menlo Park , CA , USA .

We also want to thank the ONTOLOG-Forum, its members, and the ONTOLOG- 
forum SWS Panel organizers and in particular Peter Yim (CIM  
Engineering, San Mateo, CA, USA) and Nicolas Rouquette (NASA Jet  
Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech, Pasedena, CA, USA).

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E. M. (Max) Maximilien, Ph.D.
IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA USA
maxim@us.ibm.com
Homepage: http://maximilien.org