David Martin
SRI International, California, USA
http://www.ai.sri.com/~martin/
Title of talk: Semantic Web Services: Past, Present, and Possible Futures
Summary of talk: The Semantic Web is many things: an ambitious vision for the future of the Internet; a lively research area; a set of standards activities at the World Wide Web Consortium; a technology base of Web-oriented knowledge representation languages, reasoners, and tools; and a growing collection of shared ontologies, knowledge bases, collaborative activities and communities supported by these technologies. The potential of the Semantic Web goes well beyond its applications to information discovery and querying. In particular, it encompasses the automation of Web-based activities and Web-accessible devices as well. When it becomes widespread, the ability to deploy, discover, and use online processing resources and devices, in a significantly automated fashion, will likely be viewed as a major transformation of the Web. Semantic Web services technology is the embodiment of this developing trend.
Work on Semantic Web Services is complementary (to a degree) with commercial work on Web services, and provides greater expressiveness in describing services in a way that software agents can reason about. This reasoning, in turn, can support more powerful and more fully automated approaches to Web service tasks such as service discovery, selection, invocation, execution, composition, monitoring, and recovery. This presentation will explain the concepts embodied in Semantic Web Services, show how it ties in with developing industry standards, and discuss some existing applications. A perspective will be given on the status of work in this field, challenges requiring further attention, and possible paths towards realizing its promise.
Biography: David Martin is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, where he has been on the research staff since 1994. He has worked extensively in the field of agent-based systems, and was one of the principal designers of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA). He serves as chair of the research coalition that developed OWL-S, a service description ontology for the Semantic Web, and was co-chair of the language subcommittee of The Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI). He has organized workshops and presented overviews and tutorials on Semantic Web Services in a number of venues, and was a co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's 2005 Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services.