The “WSMO-Lite: Lightweight Semantic Descriptions for Services on the Web” specification has been published as a W3C Member Submission, co-authored by experts from the University of Insbruck, the Open University, Ontotext AD, FZI, and the University of Manchester. WSMO-Lite is a restricted subset of WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology), to be used as an extension to SAWSDL and WSDL for Web Services descriptions. It proposes a layered approach for addition of semantics at the different description levels: the data model (in XML Schema) is annotated with a domain ontology, the interface (in WSDL) is annotated with conditions for invocation of the service and effects of that invocation, the overall functionality of the service is annotated thanks to a service classification ontology.

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The RIF Working Group met for the 13th and final time at MIT’s Stata Center in Cambridge, Mass., on April 15-17. The meeting was extremely productive, closing all critical path issues and forming a concrete plan to bring all rec-track drafts to last call by May, 2009. Among the notable decisions made, RIF will release a very minor change to the Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) – adding lists and removing a restriction on functions and predicate with multiple arities – as a second last call; a new version of RDF+OWL Compatibility (SWC) will be released also as a second last-call, due mainly to the addition of OWL-2; the rdf:text spec will be published, jointly with the OWL WG, as last call; the XML schema datatypes supported by RIF will be the same as those supported by OWL-2; all RIF dialects will support lists as part of the syntax and semantics. The last call documents for RIF Core, PRD, BLD, FLD, DTB, and SWC will be released in late May.

— JACEK KOPECKY, CARLOS PEDRINACI

Executive Summary

Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks especially address service discovery, composition and execution. This article first describes WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of service semantics that builds on a W3C standard for semantic annotations of WSDL. WSMO-Lite distinguishes four kinds of service semantics (functional, nonfunctional, behavioral and information) and it provides a simple and modular ontology for capturing these semantics. Secondly, the article describes MicroWSMO, an approach for semantic description of RESTful services, which have been largely neglected both in context of SOA and in SWS research. MicroWSMO uses WSMO-Lite semantics and thus integrates RESTful services in our Semantic Web Service automation.

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