Re: Commercial/Real-world Semantic Web Services?

I'd like to suggest that when we see anyone is talking about SWS or WS
in this community and in the world, first of all, we must be especially
careful about whether s/he is talking about a Web-site or not. 

W3C has such doubt and said in 2004 "There are many things that might
be called "Web services" in the world at large". For this reason, we
have to open our eyes and examine carefully and independently not only
what has been said in those papers, comments and documentations, but
also what has been done in practice, tutorials, demos.

So, what are Web services and how to implement Web services? The answer
is in W3C documentation "Web Services Architecture" @
http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/ - clearly Web services are NOT equal to
Web sites and unfortunately it seems most people in SWS-IG ignored its
emphasis on *agreement* - "The important point is that the parties MUST
AGREE on the semantics, regardless of how that is achieved." SWS then
has to be a joint venture of all participants in the community that
cooperate and negotiate to agree, generate and then share the "shared"
ontologies for different domains of services.

Considering the general goal of SWS as the automatic and dynamic
service discovery, matchmaking, composition and invocation, I have to
say SWS should be a systematic and synthetic project. Each sub-system or
sub-goal has to interact tightly with the others. We may not only target
one of the sub-goals and work on it because the result may not be able
to comply with the requirements for other sub-goals. For example,
whether the result of service composition will enable, or be
relevant/helpful to, the dynamic service invoation. For this reason, W3C
might have to be the coordinator to handle such synthetic SWS.

Regards,

Xuan



>>> Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu> 10/12/2006 5:07 AM >>>

On Oct 9, 2006, at 6:13 PM, Ed Addison wrote:

> I would suggest that those commercial applications that use  
> semantic web, or semantic web-like technology would not necessarily 

> advertise that that's what they are doing.  The semantic web is a  
> tool, not a product or market. SInce the semantic web is in its  
> infancy, commercial applications that do use semantic web  
> technology most likely use a significantly scoped down subset of  
> it.  The semantic web is more likely to slowly infiltrate various  
> information products and web services rather than suddenly get  
> commercial adoption.  Might be tough to find or even classify the  
> cases for your study.  Good luck.

One must be especially careful about such suggestions. While it is  
true that companies using SWS tech may not have a reason to advertize 

that (esp. if it is not their product!), it runs a bit close to the  
"there *is* stuff going on *because* we don't know about it". There  
are enough people interested that I would expect *some* information  
to leak out. In any case, it's best to be humble :)

Received on Thursday, 12 October 2006 15:37:45 UTC