The SUPER project has proposed an ontology stack for Semantic BPM, two ontologies from which correspond to these viewpoints. Firstly, the Business Process Modelling Ontology (BPMO) attempts to model a business analyst’s view on a business process in its organizational context and business domain. Secondly Semantic BPEL is an ontology-based view on a SWS-based extension to BPEL, the industry’s de facto standard for representing service-oriented executable business processes. Two corresponding deliverables in the CMS working group will continue the work on these ontologies to standardization, and consider their inter-relationship with each other and other relevant CMS work.
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Semantic Business Process Management
Written by Barry Norton Tuesday, 10 February 2025 08:49
Semantic Business Process Management (Semantic BPM) is a recent and promising research area devoted to extending the results from Semantic Web Services (SWS) - i.e., the application of ontology-based modelling and reasoning to Web Services - to Business Process Management, which is these days often realised using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Semantic BPM, from one point of view, concerns the addition of corresponding semantic annotations to the business-oriented view on processes. Since, however, the Semantic Web approach, realised using ontologies, is not simply to represent conceptualisations (in the style of a data model) but to embody relationships and inferences over such conceptualisations, an equally important task to realise Semantic BPM is hence to relate business-oriented and IT/service-oriented views of processes ontologically.
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hRESTS: Reaching for Descriptions of RESTful Services
Written by Jacek Kopecky Tuesday, 02 December 2024 08:50
RESTful services? You know, Flickr API, del.icio.us API , World Bank API, the Geonames service etc. These services are great sources of data and functionality for mashups and other applications. Let’s see how one uses such services.
Some of such services provide programming language libraries (see Flickr API kits) , e.g. in Javascript for running in the browser, but also in other languages, such as Ruby for running inside Railsapplications on the server. If such a library is available, you just download it and invoke its methods just like with any local APIs. If you use an IDE, it’ll help you with the method names and parameters etc.
Example (with a hypothetical API kit), which will add a picture to the user’s list of favorites:
flickr.favorites.add(user_auth, api_key, photo_id)
What if your programming language is not supported? What if there are no libraries at all for a service you want to use? Well it’s simple, you go, read the documentation, make those HTTP GET and POST requests using your favorite HTTP library, and all is nice and well. No help from the IDE because it doesn’t know about that Web service, it can only help you with the methods and parameters of the HTTP library.
Example without any Flickr API kit, with a hypothetical HTTP library:
URI = "http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.favorites.add"
URI.append("&api_key=" + api_key)
URI.append("&photo_id=" + photo_id)
URI.append("&auth_token=" + auth_token) // retrieved previously
URI.append("&api_sig=" + computeFlickrApiSig(...)) // extra function specific for flickr
HTTP.POST(URI)
For the provider of a Web service, making the client libraries carries some nuisances: first, the effort to program and test it. Second, that’s multiplied by the number of programming languages one wants to support. Third, when the service evolves (and that’s not an “if”), the client libraries must be updated as well. Flickr, for instance, doesn’t maintain or provide support for the API kits it lists.
In contrast, WS-* services (those that use SOAP, WSDL and the like) don’t need client libraries because they have WSDL. A service description in WSDL makes it possible to have client libraries prepared dynamically or pre-generated in more languages than the providers care about.
Wouldn’t it be nice if RESTful services had something like WSDL descriptions?
Well, WSDL is generally perceived as unsuitable for RESTful services (but there are counterexamples). Then there’s WADL, with some support, but not much (yet?). Then there could be HTML forms (and XForms), which, for some reason, nobody seems to provide either.
Apart from HTTP, what’s common for all the RESTful services? (At least those we know of) There’s always pretty detailed documentation for developers. It contains all the information that’s necessary for invoking the service, but it’s in text, not in WADL/WSDL or any other machine-readable format.
Come hRESTS: it’s our microformat that identifies the operations and their inputs and outputs in the textual (HTML) documentation. A page with hRESTS markup can tell us, in a machine-readable way, what operations are available at a given RESTful API, at what URIs these operations are invoked (together with parameters, where necessary), with what HTTP method (GET, POST…), and it can also identify the blocks of documentation that describe the inputs and outputs of the operation.
Example (with a hypothetical hRESTS implementation in a dynamic language):
hrests.load("http://www.flickr.com/services/api/")
hrests.flickr.favorites.add(api_key, photo_id, auth_token, computeFlickrApiSig(...))
In hRESTS, we make it possible to describe the basic aspects of a service in a machine-readable way with very simple markup added to the already existing service documentation.
But we don’t stop here: we can extend hRESTS with further information, such as semantic annotations for Semantic Web Service automation. More about this in the future, though.
Btw, also see Tomas Vitvar’s take on hRESTS over at his blog. hRESTS is coauthored by myself,Karthik Gomadam and Tomas.
CMS and the Future Internet
Written by Dave Lambert Monday, 23 June 2024 08:51
CMS is part of a research community developing the internet, but the internet is now almost 50 years old, and designed long before many of today’s challenges were apparent. Mobility, device heterogeneity, peer-to-peer relationships and traffic, trust management and web services are all now becoming major problems for current technologies. Both US and Japanese governments have instigated large-scale programmes intended to define a next generation internet, and the European Union has begun its own Future Internet initiative. The kick-off meeting in Bled brought together government ministers, academics and industry leaders to discuss what Europe needs from the internet in coming decades. This resulted in a Future Internet ‘manifesto’, the Bled declaration. This vision will shape forthcoming calls in the EU’s Framework Programme 7. For the sixty FP7 projects already running, the effort is on shepherding related research projects along a cohesive axis. Collaborations are sought through six working groups: But the real focus is interdisciplinary collaboration, with almost half of each group comprising ‘outsiders’ from other areas. For CMS, the Future Internet is vindication of its approach: there is already widespread agreement across the participants that semantics and services will play key roles in any future internet. CMS participant project ServiceWeb 3.0 is one of the coordinators, and CMS co-chair John Domingue will also co-chair the services and architectures group. Forthcoming events related to the Future Internet include a continuation of the Bled event at the Future Internet Assembly in Madrid, and the Future Internet Symposium, a research conference exploring the cross-domain issues for semantics and services. The services working group wiki is publicly readable.
WSMO-Lite Paper Accepted for ESWC 2008
Written by Tomas Vitvar Monday, 19 May 2024 08:52
WSMO-Lite, which describes a lightweight service ontology and annotation mechanism for Web Service Description Language (WSDL), has been accepted for the European Semantic Web Conference 2008 (you can download the paper here). WSMO-Lite which is currently under the review process in the CMS WG, has been co-authored byTomas Vitvar, Jacek Kopecky, Jana Viskova and Dieter Fensel. In the paper we define the service ontology describing constructs for services’ information model (ontology) as well as functional services’ descriptions (i.e., categorization, conditions and effects). Using the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL), we define a mechanism for annotation of various WSDL components with WSMO-Lite semantic descriptions. In addition, we define the algorithm to derive the behavioral service descriptions in a form of Abstract State Machines (ASM) from functional annotations (i.e. conditions and effects) of WSDL interface operations and we outline a usage of semantic annotations for a number of services’ use tasks such as service discovery, composition, selection, mediation, etc.
Conceptual Models for Services Working Group Takes Off
Written by Tomas Vitvar Friday, 01 February 2025 08:53
The Conceptual Models for Services Working Group (CMS WG) has been approved by the STI International board of management in December 2007 and it will start with the beginning of February 2008. The chairs of the working group are: John Domingue (Open University, UK), Tomas Vitvar (STI Innsbruck, Austria), and Michal Zaremba (STI Innsbruck, Austria). The working group has now the website up and running and the first phone conference is scheduled for the second week of February 2008 (feel free to subscribe to the calendar of the working group related events). With the new CMS WG, the mission of the WSMO WG will be finalized. The WSMO WG has significantly contributed to the research of the Semantic Web Services by developing the conceptual model WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology), the language WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) and the architecture and a reference implementation WSMX. All this work has been mainly carried out within a number of EU FP6 funded projects (e.g., DIP, SEKT and Knowledge Web). The goal of the CMS WG is to continue this endeavor in two main forms. Firstly, the group maintains WSMO adding updates depending on requests from Semantic Web Service researchers and practitioners. Secondly, using WSMO as a starting point the group develops a number of new ontologies including WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology which uses RDFS as the description language and defines mechanisms to annotate WSDL descriptions using SAWSDL, MicroWSMO, a semantic annotation of RESTful services, and Semantic Annotations of Processes, an ontology for describing processes which are implemented as Web services (see the working group charter for more information). We are looking forward to working with you in the new CMS WG!