Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semanticweb.com recently caught up with Dr. John Domingue, deputy director of the U.K.’s Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Dr. Domingue specializes in researching how semantic web technology can support the automated creation of web applications from web services. KMI was set up at the Open University — which was created in the 1960s to serve those who missed out on higher education and now has 220,000 students studying via distance learning courses — to carry out research related to the creation and sharing of knowledge, and today one of its big research topics is the semantic web.

Currently, Domingue is running about five EU projects in the KMI Lab on the semantic web, with a combined value approaching $50 million.

Semanticweb.com: Tell us about your specific work in the semantic web field, and what you research is based on.

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Domingue: My specific area is in semantic web services, applying semantic web technology to web services, with the angle of automatically constructing applications.

All of the research is based on our conceptual framework and implementation platform. The framework is WSMO — the Web Services Modeling Ontology. The main things about WSMO is that it leverages four top principles — everything is underpinned by ontologies; there are web service descriptions where we differentiate between the function of a web service and how you invoke it; and there is the concept of a goal. So let’s say that me, as a user, my goal is to go on holiday in southern Europe in a child-friendly place — you specify that in the goal. Then web services will match that goal — like, I am a hotel available for certain dates, and I am an airline company, so we match between the user goal and services — you combine the services to reach the goal.

So the elements are web service composition, invocation and discovery, and also a top principle is the concept of a mediator. You specify your goal and I grab some web services in the wild on the Internet, and there will be mismatches in the structure of the data, the underlying conceptual model, in requirements (like you must send a credit card for a service). We have a language for describing mediators that fix these types of problems.

Then the implementation platform is called IRS-III. That is a platform we constructed where we can manipulate and run WSMO-based models. So you specify the goal, send it to IRS, and it acts as a broker between your goal and web services.

WSMO started in an EU project called DIP. that ran from January 2004 to the end of December 2006.

Semanticweb.com: Why do we need to apply semantic web technology to web services?

Domingue: Scalability, that’s the line we always put in. Web services as they are currently won’t scale, because every time you want to make a change a human software developer is involved in the loop. As you move to billions of services you need to automate some of these aspects and the only path to automation is to describe some of the components using semantics.

Addtionally, because web services correspond to business services we can turn organizations from monolithic black boxes to a set of micro functionalities which add value for the customer. If I can describe the services offered semantically, and they can be recomposed on the fly automatically and that’s very exciting.

We don’t require that web services change at all. This is a layer on top of web services. For web services you have an end point, a URI, to send a message to. Then some other person describes that semantically. One possible complaint is that the description may be complex. A commercial company may not want to learn about this ontology and heavy-weight stuff. What I say to them is look at the new W3C recommendation on SA WSDL, which is semantic annotations for WSDL (Web Service Definition Language). If a company wants to make a first step to semantics, then they can look at that — put a hook into a WSDL file that points to some semantic definition.

We are also starting to work on lighter weight versions of WSMO, too. The one we are currently working on is WSMO Lite, with less complex descriptions Then we will start working on Micro WSMO for rest-based services. A rest-based service is just what you type into a web browser — so it looks like what you type in as a URL. It is a more light-weight way of providing a service, and theoretically one of the simplest ways of doing it.

Semanticweb.com: Tell us about some of the specific projects you now have underway based on the WSMO framework and IRS implementation platform.

Domingue: The first project is called the Living Human Digital Library.The LHDL is in the bioinfomatics domain, and we are working with such people in that domain to create a complete computer model of the human muscular-skeleton system from the protein to the whole body level. We achieve this through a collection of large data sources and repositories and various services for manipulating this that we integrate with our semantic web services technology.

LUISA is applying what we do to e-learning . If you look at e-learning research, the main work is based on metadata standards. You have a description of content in web repositories. We want to change the paradigm from database metadata to a set of functions that are implemented as web services that we manipulate, services to provide learning for students and for authors.

The final one is a larger project called Super. Super is a project of a consortium–as all European projects are consortium-based, with SAP and IBM on this one. Super is for business managers who are not IT experts who want to understand what the business processes are that are running in IT systems and manage them. For example, which processes cost me money, which bring me money. To do this now they must call IT developers to do queries and make changes, and we want to automate that process. So we take semantic web services as a layer for business processes in IT systems and we create semantic descriptions for the business layer. There are various business notations like BPMN and workflow engines that run workflow execution languages such as BPEL, so we create ontologies between all those layers and map between them

There’s also a concerted action called Service Web 3.0, and another called SOA4All. The basic idea of SOA4All is that there are 30 billion resources on the web but only about 10 or 12 thousand web services on the [open] web. A lot of web services are behind firewalls. We want to make web services ubiquitous on the web, on the scale of billions, and to do this we combine web services technology, semantics for describing these, and Web 2.0. .

Semanticweb.com: Are there any commercial implementations that are based on this framework and implementation platform?

Domingue: In all my EU projects we have use case partners and we deploy for users in a particular industrial use case setting. An example of that is eMerges. This was an application we did for [England's] Essex County Council, in e-government, where we integrated IRS with Google maps to support emergency planning. You’d draw dots on a Google map to say the emergency is here, then it calls to services to get you information about that, such as where to take evacuees. It was a demonstration but not live.

Another, in the Super project, we are working with Telefonica to help them with their business process planning. So we have various test cases, but no live commercial system yet.

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