Services Research - Investigating the role of semantics in modeling, description, enactment and execution in Service Oriented Architectures

The services science research laboratory at
the kno.e.sis center investigates the role of semantics in
modeling,description, enactment and execution of services and processes.
The services group, formerly known as the METEOR-S project group at the LSDIS
Lab, has been a pioneer in many of the Semantics and Services related research advancements.

The growth of Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) offers attractive basis for realizing dynamic
architectures, which mirrorthe dynamic and ever changing business
environment. With the help of industry wide acceptance of standards like
Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL), Web
Service Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP/REST, Web Services offer
the potential of low cost and immediate integration with other
applications and partners.

Current Research

Recent research has focused on the latest
extension of SOA, popularly known as Cloud computing. Computing clouds
represent the next evolution of SOA by offering infrastructure, platform or
software as services. This presents significant challenges to the established
service computing practices but we see plenty of opportunities to apply semantics and SOA
knowledge in this new field of research.

Past Research

In the context of SOAP based services,
the research in the services science lab focused on adding semantics
to Web services standards (WSDL-S / SAWSDL / WS-Policy / WS- Agreement),
services discovery and selection (MWSDI and Semantic Services Registry)
and adaptive and autonomic services(Event Identification and
Adaptation). Our open source software releases can be downloaded from
kno.e.sis open source downloads page.

In the context of REST based services,
we focused our research on SA-REST and SMASHUPs. SA-REST, like SAWSDL is
an evolutionary way to add semantics to rest based services. Currently,
the notion of mashups is limited to static binding of services or
provide limited dynamism. A smashup is defined as a semantically
enriched mashup that can be composed on the fly.