News Release: World Wide Web Consortium Holds Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services

Today, W3C opens the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web 
services in Innsbruck, Austria. By bringing together heterogeneous 
communities (Semantic Web and Web Services communities, researchers and 
industrial software developers and users), W3C aims to identify areas of 
shared interest between Web services and Semantic Web communities.

For more information, please contact Janet Daly, janet@w3.org, +1 617
253 5884.

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World Wide Web Consortium Holds Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in 
Web Services

Groups to identify points of intersection between Web services and 
Semantic Web

Web Resources
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This Press Release:
    In English: http://www.w3.org/2005/06/sws-pressrelease.html.en
    In French: http://www.w3.org/2005/06/sws-pressrelease.html.fr
    In Japanese: http://www.w3.org/2005/06/sws-pressrelease.html.ja

W3C Rule Languages Workshop: http://www.w3.org/2005/04/FSWS/program.html

http://www.w3.org/ -- 9 June 2005 - Today, the World Wide Web Consortium 
(W3C) opens the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web services 
in Innsbruck, Austria. Hosted by the Digital Enterprise Research 
Institute (DERI) Innsbruck and supported by EC's IST programme WS2 
project, over 60 organizations are presenting papers which aim to 
identify areas of shared interest between Web services and Semantic Web 
communities.

Semantics description is key to several high-level Web services concerns

Web services standards, under development in the W3C Web Services 
Activity and other organizations, make up an integrated technology stack 
that Web applications developers can rely on to ensure interoperability. 
 From the beginning, research has been conducted to meet particular 
needs in this area, such as registering resources or services, 
discovering resources or services on the Web, composing a service by 
using several other services, etc. The early solutions consist of using 
Web agents, often using pre-defined directories, sometimes simply 
crawling the Web.

In parallel, the W3C Semantic Web Activity has developed the initial 
building blocks of the Semantic Web technologies: the Resource 
Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The W3C 
Semantic Web Services Interest Group - with over 450 participants - has 
shown strong interest in having more integrated semantics inside the Web 
Services stack, and also provides evidence of a rich variety of research 
proceeding in this area. This work aims towards the general objective of 
a more comprehensive, more expressive framework for describing all 
aspects of services, which can enable more powerful tools and fuller 
automation of a broad range of Web services activities.

Interest in identifying shared solutions is growing

Recently, during the W3C Constraints and Capabilities Workshop, 
proposals including Semantic Web technologies have already been 
discussed, in the light of requirements for expressing policies for Web 
Services. W3C is now looking into a generic extensible framework based 
on Semantic Web technologies, to support longer-term objectives, while 
continuing to develop immediate solutions for the most pressing Web 
Services requirements. Integration to the Web Services stack, and also 
in the Web architecture, should be key properties of such a framework.

The intent of the workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services 
is to provide advice to W3C on possible future work in the area. By 
bringing together heterogeneous communities (Semantic Web and Web 
Services communities, researchers and industrial software developers and 
users), W3C hopes to identify better use cases, leading to more 
effective and comprehensive solutions. Topics covered include:
   * Semantic Web background technologies; e.g. RDF, OWL
   * Web Services background technologies; e.g. SOAP, WSDL
   * Registries, taxonomies, and search mechanisms; e.g. UDDI
   * Ontologies for Web Services; e.g. OWL-S, WSMO
   * Web Services Choreography; e.g. WS-CDL
   * Business process; e.g. BPEL4WS

Next Actions to include final report

Following the two-day workshop, W3C is to issue a report with 
conclusions based on presentations and discussions. All materials, 
including the papers themselves, are available for public review.

     Contact America, Australia -- Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, 
+1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
     Contact Europe, Africa, and the Middle East -- Marie-Claire Forgue, 
<mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
     Contact Asia -- Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing 
common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its 
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run 
by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT 
CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and 
Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in 
Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of 
information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and 
various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new 
technology. To date, over 350 organizations are Members of the 
Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

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Received on Thursday, 9 June 2005 07:04:41 UTC