RE: question about "Semantic Annotations for WSDL"

Dear Dr. Martin and other colleagues,

Please examine the following WSDL files to see how you can add semantic
annotations to such living Web services. 

The "findLocationByAddress" function of the Address Finder Web services
provided by ESRI, the world-leading vendor of Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) software.  

We can find the latest Address Finder Web Service's WSDL file at:
http://www.arcwebservices.com/services/v2006/AddressFinder.wsdl 

and its 2nd version at:
http://arcweb.esri.com/services/v2/AddressFinder.wsdl 

in which findLocationByAddress function was called findAddress.

As you can see, ESRI changed a lot in its system design and business logic.
Thus the names of the elements in WSDL documents are mostly different.

However, the meaning of Address Finder Web service has been the same even
from its first version, that is: if requester send the provider a request
that contains such information as user name, password, data source, street
address, city, state, zip code, then the provider will geocode the address
and return back either a list of longitude and latitude that matches the
input address or an error message.

>From such living Web services, can you believe that the meaning of Web
service has NO relation with the content of WSDL document? If it is true,
then why people in this group cannot give up using the failed SW technique
to add semantic annotations to WSDL-which has nothing to do with the
semantics of Web services?

Best wishes,

Xuan


-----Original Message-----
From: David Martin
To: public-sws-ig@w3c.org
Sent: 2/27/06 6:59 PM
Subject: question about "Semantic Annotations for WSDL"



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 Wednesday, 1 March 2006 15:26:57 UTC