Services Research - Investigating the role of semantics in modeling, description,enactment and execution in SOA

Overview

The services science research project 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 at the LSDIS Lab, first proposed the classification of semantics into Data,Functional, Non-Functional and Execution semantics.

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.

In the context ofSOAP based services, the research in the services science project focuses 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 focus 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.