Re: What's the point in using OWL-S?

I have to say, what Dr. McDermott said can just demonstrate that OWL-S
may be useful in the stage of service integration/aggregation, for
example, in case when developers or requesters look for multiple
services (reserve hotel or rental car, book aireline ticket, etc.),
supposed such services are semantically well described and defined
before  a reasoning system can do matchmaking and composition.

But what is the goal of SWS for service providers? Can we say service
providers only have the responsibility to describe the meaning, or
semantics, of the service? Can service providers have any control on
service integration? I don't think so. It is for this reason that I just
said, OWL-S misleads this group for SWS.

OWL-S may be helpful as Dr. McDermott suggested. But those points are
for application developers or service requesters. For service providers
and this IG, I have to suggest that the goal of SWS focus on describing
the meaning or semantics of certain kinds of services, such as what are
the service semantics of hotel reservation service, rental car service,
hotel reservation service, etc. How to do service matchmaking and
aggregation/mediation is not the business of service providers and this
IG.

W3C should separate the SWS architecture by differentiating the
responsibility of service provider vs. service requester. The mixure
approach like OWL-S is not advantageous for further development. When we
focus on the server-side responsibility to define service semantics,
then we can see the importance of agreement and standard in this
process.

Regards,

Xuan


>>> Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu> 06/03/06 12:16 PM >>>

In my opinion, the place where Owl-S may be useful is when several web
services are needed to solve a problem stated in terms that don't
mention web services (as such) at all.  The problem might be to
reserve a room and an airplane flight for a conference at a certain
location and time.  In order to solve this problem, a reasoning system
needs to find web services that can achieve subgoals that the problem
comprises.  Owl-S provides a framework for connecting two things:

 - At the abstract level, expressing what subgoals are achieved by
   message exchange with a web service.
 
 - At the concrete level, expressing how messages are encoded using
   (e.g.) SOAP

The ontology-matching problem enters into this picture, but not as the
central problem.

[Note the qualification: "in my opinion."]


                                         -- Drew McDermott
                                            Yale University
                                            Computer Science Department

Received on Saturday, 3 June 2006 19:42:07 UTC