Conceptual Models for Services Working Group Charter

Conceptual Models for Services Working Group Charter

12 May 2024

This document is the charter of the Conceptual Models for Services Working Group of the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) International.

Table of contents

  1. Mission
  2. Scope
  3. Out of scope
  4. Deliverables
  5. Schedule and duration
  6. Participation
  7. Meetings
  8. Communication, confidentiality
  9. IPR policy
  10. Updates to this charter

1. Mission

Over the last few years extensive work has been carried out on the specifications for Semantic Web Services under the common umbrella of the Web Services Modelling Ontology (WSMO). This work has been based around a number of European projects, including DIP, SEKT and KnowledgeWeb, and resulted in the creation of an ontology for characterising Web services (WSMO), an associated family of languages (WSML) and reference implementation (WSMX). This work has also been applied to Business Process Modelling in the European projects SUPER and SOA4All.

The Conceptual Models for Services Working Group (CMS WG) will continue these activities with three main focuses.

First, the group will maintain WSMO, adding updates and extensions depending on requests from Semantic Web Service researchers and practitioners. Secondly, using WSMO as a starting point, the group will create a number of new ontologies including:

  1. WSMO-Lite - a lightweight ontology which uses RDFS as the description language and defines mechanisms to annotate WSDL descriptions using SAWSDL.
  2. MicroWSMO - which will enable the semantic annotation of REST services.
  3. BPMO - a Business Process Modelling Ontology for describing processes at an abstract level, annotated with semantic goals.
  4. Semantic BEPL - an extension to BPEL allowing the definition of executable business processes involving semantic web service execution and mediation.

Finally, the group will maintain the existing WSML family of languages making extensions and additions, motivated by on-going work in European projects including SOA4All and LarKC, particularly:

  1. WSML-Quark - a very lightweight language for knowledge representation focussed on classification.
  2. WSML-Core 2.0 - an extended core based on DLP, but with the addition of individual equivalence.
  3. L2 - a lightweight core knowledge representation language, comparable with WSML-Core, operating directly on RDF triples and geared towards scalability.
  4. WSML-DL 2.0 - a variant that extends WSML-Core 2.0 in the direction of description logics including the semantics of ELP, i.e. EL++ with DLP that encompasses OWL 2 profiles: El, QL, RL.
  5. WSML-Flight/Rule 2.0 - variants that extend WSML-Core in the direction of logic programming, where WSML-Fight is semantically equivalent to Datalog with locally stratified negation and WSML-Rule extends WSML-Flight with function symbols, unsafe-rules and well-founded negation.

As well as the on-going work in SOA4All and LarKC we expect new projects to contribute to the content of the working group. The group will also take note of recently completed, on-going and new standardisation efforts within W3C and OASIS especially: RIF, SAWSDL and the SWS Testbed Incubator Group within W3C; and the OASIS Semantic Execution Environments Technical Committee.

2. Scope

The working group will focus on three areas:

  1. Maintenance and updating of WSMO and related service models including WSMO-Lite and MicroWSMO,
  2. Maintenance and updating of the WSML family of languages --- that is, the 2.0 versions and WSML-Quark --- and L2,
  3. Development of ontologies for business process modelling, including BPMO and Semantic BPEL.

The working group will also make an explicit link with initiatives involved in implementing prototypes of the working group specifications, such as Technical Task Force (TTF), Web Service Modelling Toolkit (WSMT) or WSMOStudio. The working group will not, however, coordinate these implementations.

3. Out of scope

The working group will not work on issues related to architectures and coordination of implementations of the working group specifications. If necessary specifications for architectures will be adopted from other initiatives such as those within OASIS or W3C.

4. Deliverables

The working group will work on the areas outlined in Section 2. For each of the proposed work in the areas, the WG will produce the following types of deliverables:

  1. A formal specification [mandatory].
  2. An explanatory guide (primer) for dissemination of a formal specification [whether necessary to be decided as per process below].
  3. A set of test cases covering the features of a formal specification [whether necessary to be decided as per process below].

The deliverables for the formal specification and explanatory guide will follow the attached template. The deliverables that are necessary will be decided according to the process of developing the deliverables, which is as follows:

  1. A WG member will propose the work in one of the WG areas by submitting a short work proposal to the WG chairs. The work proposal will contain: explanation of the work in the WG area, timeline of the work, expected deliverables.
  2. WG chairs will review the proposal and decide whether they accept, reject or request more information. If they accept the proposal, they define a set of deliverables and their types. Each accepted proposal must lead to a formal specification while other types of deliverable required will be decided by WG chairs.
  3. WG chairs will appoint a set of editors for each of the proposed deliverables, who are responsible for updating the content of the deliverable. The editors publish the first dated Working Draft (as described in Section 8) with an initial version number 0.1 on the WG website.
  4. Apart from editors, a deliverable may list further authors in order to acknowledge that these individuals have contributed significantly, but were not involved as editors.
  5. The editors may update the deliverable at any time and publish a new Working Draft, notifying the WG about the new update.
  6. Every deliverable in an advanced stage of development has at least one Reviewer (approved by the WG Chairs). When the editors consider the deliverable finished, they will propose to do a final formal review with the Reviewer(s); less formal early reviews are encouraged.
  7. After the final formal review, the editors report on the reviewer comments, how they were handled, and may propose the deliverable to be closed by the WG. The WG may then publish a dated Final Draft, potentially with an increased version number (e.g. 1.0 for mature material), and communicate it to STI International members and the wider public as described in Section Section 8.
  8. The WG may, at any time, start a new version of a Final Draft deliverable. The selected Editors should then proceed to publish a first dated Working Draft with the appropriate increased version number. The deliverable process is then repeated.

In order to demonstrate progress, the working group is expected to publish an update of at least one of its deliverables at most 6 months after the last publication. Optimally, every Working Draft should be updated periodically (this is a so-called "heartbeat requirement".)

5. Schedule and duration

The Working Group has been initially established for the period of 3 years until December 2010. After this date, the Working Group may continue with other objectives (subject to approval of the new charter by STI International Board). Within this period, the following timeline is being followed:

December 2007
Working Group created
Working Group web site and mailing lists created.
Initial Working Group members appointed.
January 2008 - December 2010
Working Group in operation (proposals for work, deliverables, review, face-to-face meetings, phone conferences).

6. Participation

The Chairs of the WG are: John Domingue ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), Michal Zaremba ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Dumitru Roman ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

The role of the Chairs is to guide and moderate the discussions, to approve/define the work proposal, to appoint deliverable editors and reviewers, and to assure the timely progress of the Working Group.

The Working Group is open to participation by individuals from all members and projects of STI International. In addition, participation is also open to invited experts from the community, selected by the Chairs and approved by the STI International Board, in order to balance the technical experience of the group. All participants must agree to this charter and abide by its rules, otherwise they may be removed from the WG.

Prospective participants may join or leave the WG by sending a simple request by email to at least one of the WG Chairs. The Chairs maintain a list of active WG participants.

Every deliverable under development is maintained by its editors. Other members of the WG are expected to provide comments or other contributions, or raise issues. In case of disagreement within the WG, the members should seek the technically and scientifically most suitable solution to the issue at hand. Continuing disagreements may be resolved by the Chairs.

The Working Group will maintain a list of meeting notes from the phone conferences and face-to-face meetings as well as mailing list archives. In case of issues and dissents, the WG may maintain a list of such issues and their resolutions.

7. Meetings

The Working Group is expected to hold frequent regular distributed meetings (e.g. teleconferences), scheduled by the Chairs to optimize participation. Meetings will be ordinarily be scheduled as biweekly conference calls.

The Working Group will also organize annual face-to-face meetings co-located with major events such as STI International meetings, European Semantic Web Conference or International Semantic Web Conference, in order to utilize the increased bandwidth of such a setting. In case of limited participation in such a meeting, the WG should communicate the notes of the meeting to the participants who were absent, to give them a chance to catch up and comment.

8. Communication, confidentiality

The work in progress and results of the Working Group will be reported at the website at http://cms-wg.sti2.org. The website will contain all relevant information about the Working Group including charter, links to the mailing list and its archives, all the deliverables, both final and those under development, public contact list of WG participants, meeting schedules and other administrative information. The WG Chairs will appoint the website administrator(s).

The WG website may contain an area restricted only to formal WG participants, with information such as contact lists, meeting schedules and other administrative information. The list of WG participants may be public or restricted as decided by the Chairs.

The Working Group will mainly communicate using two mailing lists, one for member only discussions (related to administrative issues) at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and one for public discussions at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . All technical discussions will be public. The public mailing list will be open to any interested individuals from research and industry. These individuals do not need to formally participate in the Working Group. The Chairs will appoint the moderator(s) of the mailing lists.

The working group will also use member-only chat (e.g. via Skype) for exchanging information during the phone conferences and face-to-face meetings and for scribing. The details of how to join this chat will be posted on the working group website and/or relevant e-mails about phone conferences and meetings.

Any Working Drafts and Final Drafts produced by this WG will bear a version number and a date. The policy for forming deliverable URIs will be specified by the website administrator. In addition, the WG will also markup all documents in RDF. The (mini) ontology for the markup will be created by the WG chairs and will be based on the ISWC ontology.

9. IPR policy

The Working Group (represented legally by STI International) will be the holder of copyright to all the deliverables produced by the WG. The deliverable editors must ensure that their deliverables do not infringe on copyright held by external parties.

Any registered names and trade marks are held by their respective owners. Organizations represented in this Working Group should generally not restrict the use of their registered names and trade marks in the deliverables of this Working Group, and any limitations should be clarified early, in order to avoid issues when the work is advanced.

The participants of this Working Group make a commitment to license any patents core to implementing the technology developed by this WG on a Royalty-Free basis to any and every interested party, unless a specific patent is explicitly exempted from this commitment. A patent is exempted if the participant does not have the authority to license the patent on a Royalty-Free basis, or if the participant does have the authority but chooses not to license the patent on a Royalty-Free basis.

Each participant must disclose all exempted patents of which they are aware (i.e. the participants need not perform an exhaustive patent search), as soon as possible after the moment when they become aware of the patent. Patent disclosures must be communicated to all the Chairs of the WG, and the Chairs should strive to resolve the situation so that implementations of the deliverables produced by the WG do not require any non-Royalty-Free patent licences.

10. Updates to this charter

This charter is maintained by John Domingue ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), Michal Zaremba ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Dumitru Roman ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Only the Board of STI International may authorize changes to this charter.

The charter template is maintained by the Executive Board of STI International.