In the world we live today, data is not hand-crafted but vastly generated by computers, data streams, data sensors and searches on the web. By abstracting from software and hardware Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has led to a paradigm shift in the computer science. All resources are seen as services in a SOA rather than software and hardware components. Hence, service oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still limited in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies [SOA4ALL (2008)]. Problems like limited means in automating service recognition, service configuration and combination, service comparison and automated negotiation remain to be resolved. Through its Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) volumes (see [NESSI-Grid (2008)] for the current version), NESSI - one of the European Technology Platforms - has defined and evaluated a number of common/emerging business scenarios. These build the basis for deriving concrete business requirements imposing various technical requirements and challenges to be resolved in order to allowing the allocation and usage of services beond organisational borders. 

 

By identification and evaluation of relevant core business scenarios like Hierarchical enterprise, Extended enterprise, Dynamic Outsourcing, Mergers & acquisitions and Virtual organisations, and by evaluation of associated business requirements, research challenges for realizing the vision of NESSI have been systematically derived. Business scenarios are characterised into the following categories: 

By evaluating the business scenarios in context of the above requirements the strategic research challenges have been identified. These led to structuring NESSI into its strategic projects discussed in the following chapter NESSI Overview. One of the resarch challanges identified and rated with high importance by the NESSI-Grid consortium is the "Reduction of the complexity of Grid technologies". As stated in [NESSI-Grid (2008)] the "Semantic technologies will be required to handle large scale Grids. The diversity and heterogeneity anticipated means that a single ontology is extremely unlikely. Scalable and efficient techniques for reasoning will be required to improve interoperability in the absence of universal standardisation." According to [SOA4All (2009)] development of semantic descriptions for Web Services, the creation of service locators based upon these descriptions and the creation of grounding mechanisms for invoking these services are promising approaches to resolve this challenge. In general, Semantic Technology aims to improve machine interpretation and processing via the use of semantic annotations. 

 

In this article the author focuses on current open standards on semantic web technologies (e.g. RDF and OWL), attended by formalisms based on these languages targeted specifically at a service-oriented environment (e.g. WSMO and OWL-S) [NESSI Semantic Technologies Working Group (2006)]. The paper reviews these current approaches in the context of NESSI - the Networked European Software and Services Initiative.  

 

The reminder of the article is organized as follows. Following the introduction chapter "NESSI Overview" gives an overview on the entire NESSI initiative. The platform NEXOF is discussed and NESSIs strategic projects are introduced briefly. Chapter "SOA4ALL" reviews the SOA4All project, one of NESSIs strategic projects, focusing on Semantic Web Technology as a key technology domain. In chapter "Semantic Web" an overview on state of the art on service description is given. Furthermore the main approaches and deliverables of the SOA4All initiative in regard of Semantic Web are discussed.  

 

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