Re: SAWSDL in WXMO-MX [was Re: Commercial/Real-world Semantic Web Services?]

Dear Matthias, Bijan,

I'm afraid I missed your previous discussion on this, but I'll chime in.

Bijan is worried that SAWSDL is just hooks without semantics. That is
intentional. The big SWS frameworks were previously quite detached from
WSDL, and so also from "Real Web Services", as the industry can see it. 

I mean, there's value in making a framework independent of the
underlying technologies, with a grounding layer that connects the
semantics with the syntactics. But the value may be outweighed by the
increased complexity in how the layers relate.

As a standard, SAWSDL basically says "whatever you SWS people do, you
should build on WSDL". Both WSMO and OWL-S now have grounding to SAWSDL
(OWL-S grounding was presented as a paper at OWL-S workshop at ESWC),
see [1] and [2]. And while working on the grounding, it becomes clear
that the frameworks can be refactored from the point of view of having
WSDL as the world model. We have WSMO-Light in the pipeline here [3],
already submitted for publication. In doing such refactoring, the
frameworks are broken down into pieces that can be much easier to agree
on across the spectrum.

I see SAWSDL as the catalyst; it doesn't do anything by itself, but its
presence makes possible (or speeds up) other developments.

As for a forum to discuss these things, there's going to be a
semantics4ws workshop [4] soon, and after that, depending on the results
and other things, I may be trying to get the W3C to organize another
workshop like we had 2 years ago [5]. And of course there's always
opportunities for birds of a feather to get together at various events.

Best regards,
Jacek

[1] http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d24/d24.2/v0.1/#grounding_sawsdl
[2] http://www.ai.sri.com/OWL-S-2007/final-versions/OWL-S-2007-Martin-Final.pdf
[3] http://wsmo.org/TR/d11/v0.2/20070622/d11v02_20070622.pdf
[4] http://events.deri.at/semantics4ws2007/
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/04/FSWS/workshop-report.html

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 14:31 +0200, Matthias Klusch wrote:
> 
> dear bijan,
> 
> it gets even more interesting now:
> W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of "Semantic Annotations for 
> WSDL and XML Schema" to Proposed Recommendation:
>      http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/PR-sawsdl-20070705/
> 
> Pointing to our very brief discussion (below), i am wondering whether
> there will be any need for an event that is going to discuss this and
> the consequences for not only the large R&D investments on owl-s, wsml, 
> swsf world wide but the vision of semantic web services itself?
> personally, i would highly appreciate to obtain some valuable answers
> from the community and the W3C representatives on this publicly
> and transparently at such a forum (without side-wars), maybe at the next
> iswc conference?
> 
> what do you think?
> 
> cordial regs, matthias
> 
> 
> Bijan Parsia schrieb:
> 
>   >> well, from what i have seen so far about trying to partially marry
> >> WSML with SWASDL (WSDL-S) that might be interesting for industrial
> >> practice. however, as far as i can (quickly) read from the working  draft
> >> of SWASDL, it provides some flexibility in basically attaching  anything
> >> you want (semantic models by modelREference) but leaving the agent  alone
> >> when it comes to formal reasoning upon these models to find  grounded 
> >> relations and dependencies between heterogeneous concepts  and data;
> >> the xsd (schema lifting and lowering) mappings are merely syntactic at
> >> data type level - means at the same level as WSDL analyzer / mapping
> >> tools.
> > 
> > 
> > Yes. If I read you right, this has long been my complaint about  SAWSDL. 
> > They're just hooks without any semantics to the hooks. This  worries me 
> > (and I don't see the advantage over plain WSDL  extensibility).
> > 
> > For example, if I use a modelReference...what does it *mean*? Is that  
> > *in* the model as well? E.g.,:
> >     http://www.w3.org/TR/sawsdl/#AnnotatingOperations
> > 
> > """The annotation of the operation element carries a reference to a  
> > concept in a semantic model that provides a high level description of  
> > the operation, specifies its behavioral aspects or includes other  
> > semantic definitions."""
> > 
> > It does all this? Any of this? I think of high level descriptions as  
> > being pretty vague whereas a behavioral specification is much tighter  
> > (is this in terms of preconditions and effects?).
> > 
> > But this is a disagreement with the basic premise of SWASDL and WSDL- S: 
> > I don't see that it does anything that would permit substantive  
> > interop. I.e., all the work is left to d.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Bijan.
> > 
> > 
>

Received on Friday, 6 July 2007 13:07:25 UTC