A right place for OWL-S

In OWL-S submission document (http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/), it
clearly stated -:

"Among the most important Web resources are those that provide services.
By "service'' we mean Web sites that do not merely provide static
information but allow one to effect some action or change in the world,
such as the sale of a product or the control of a physical device. The
Semantic Web should enable users to locate, select, employ, compose, and
monitor Web-based services automatically."

This whole paragraph described the foundation and standing point for
OWL-S approach: by service, it means Web site. And further, it
definitely described the contribution of Semantic Web to *_Web-based
services_*

When Terry said yesterday that "When we wrote the original
documentation, it was  
not talking about web sites", I was wondering how the original
documentation could be and why they changed ideas and terminologies. 

In my opinion, the right place for OWL-S is the W3C "Semantic Web" forum
as OWL-S tries to use SW technique to resolve Web site-based service and
related issues. 

The "Web service" terminology used in this SWS-IG, however, should refer
to the service that has WSDL interface, not Web interface, as specified
by W3C.

If we check the SWS tutorial @
http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d17/resources/200507-ICWS/SWStutorial-iswc05.ppt

then we can understand the so-called SWS research has focused on VTA in
this tutorial (slide #63) - here VTA is just a Web-based service that
has attracted SW people all the time.

However, for SWS-IG, we should focus on "FlightBooking" and
"HotelBooking" as mentioned in this tutorial, the two real services that
have WSDL interface, not Web interface.

Such vague concepts on "Web services" have misled us for a long time.
For now, we may have to re-start from the beginning to first develop a
mechanism to define the services (e.g. FlightBooking, HotelBooking,
etc.) like RDF/OWL that defines the concepts used in the (semantic) Web.

Regards,

Xuan

Received on Wednesday, 2 August 2006 15:08:38 UTC