- From: David Martin <martin@AI.SRI.COM>
- Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:59:40 -0800
- To: public-sws-ig@w3c.org
Here is an important question about the proposed "Semantic Annotations for WSDL" working group, about which I'd love to see some discussion. The current draft charter is here: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/sa-ws-charter.html Question: Does the envisioned approach provide a foundation that will be useful in working with, or evolving to, a more comprehensive framework, or simply a detour that will ultimately fall out of use (if Web service semantics become important)? What's behind this question is the observation that, from a WSDL-centric perspective, the semantic artifacts referenced by a WSDL spec will be disconnected. That is, from the point of view of a WSDL tool, they won't exist in the same declarative scope. (Indeed, in this approach there is *no* notion of declarative scope for the semantic artifacts, from the WSDL perspective.) One way to illustrate this concern is simply by observing that preconditions and effects associated with services will frequently have variables in common. To have a coherent representational scheme, it is of fundamental importance to spell out the relationship between variable X mentioned in a precondition and variable X mentioned in an effect expression. From the perspective of a WSDL tool, there won't be any basis for establishing or working with such a relationship. So the concern here is that a WSDL tool ultimately won't be able to do much with the semantic declarations that are referenced. Of course, the semantic framework underlying those declarations may provide the basis that ties the semantic declarations together, and a WSDL tool could build in some understanding about one or more of the semantic frameworks that may be used in connection with WSDL. But the point is that it's not a WSDL tool anymore - it's a WSDL tool plus a {UML or OWL-S or WSMO or SWSF or METEOR-S or ODESWS or ...} tool. And as far as I can tell, there won't be any meaningful connection between the two tools. The concern is that the proposed approach does not appear to provide any path by which such a meaningful connection might eventually be achieved. Cheers, David Martin SRI International
Received on Monday, 27 February 2006 23:59:50 UTC