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!