It`s all about semantics, frankly

IBM Research came up with something very interesting approach to finally incorporate semantics better into the whole Web Services story: Semantic Tools for Web Services. Definitely worth a look.

Semantic Tools for Web Services

Semantic Tools for Web Services is a set of Eclipse plug-ins that allow developers to insert into a WSDL document semantic annotations (references to concepts in a semantic model) that describe the semantics of the input, output, preconditions, and effects of service operations. A second plug-in matches the description of the service or composition of services to that for which a developer is searching. This semantic matching and composition of Web services, developed by an IBM Research team, was formerly available as part of the ETTK for Web Services and Autonomic Computing; the demos are still available. In this release, it is being made available as a stand-alone, separate, Eclipse-based plug-in, and an Eclipse-based semantic annotation editor is introduced.

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How does it work

The mechanism for annotating Web services with semantics is based on an approach developed jointly by IBM (Joel Farrell and Rama Akkiraju), and the University of Georgia (Professor Amit Sheth and his team) as part of a technical note or specification (Web Services Semantics - WSDL-S). Semantic matching and composition of Web services is based on the algorithms developed by the IBM Research team using ontology-based inferencing. The ontologies are represented in Web Ontology Language (OWL), and inferencing is accomplished via the ABLE rule engine, a technology developed by Joe Bigus et al. of IBM Research and available here at alphaWorks. Semantic composition is accomplished using backward chaining and other AI planning algorithms.

I am sure Don will investigate into this.