| The Semantic Web Bringing Semantics to Web Services (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| Arevolution is underway in computing, and if you believe pundits such as Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet, ” it won’t be long before your bathroom scale surreptitiously transmits your weight to your doctor, who might command a stop to the rocky road ice cream your fridge automatically orders for you from www.groceries. com. 1 While many of us have heard such amusing tales, ice cream lovers can relax for a little while. Pervasive networked devices and programs that can seamlessly interoperate are still a ways off. Realizing this vision requires a computing infrastructure that supports communication and interoperation between diverse, distributed computer programs and devices. Furthermore, to achieve this seamlessly, those programs and devices must know each others’ capabilities and communicate requests and responses unambiguously. Enter Web services and the Semantic Web. Web services are “self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located, and invoked over a network—generally, the World Wide Web. ” 2 (For further reading on Web services, see this issue’s Trends & Controversies on p. 72). Typical examples of Web services include the suite of programs at www.amazon.com that collectively let users buy books, or those programs at www. ual.com that let users determine flight schedules and book flights. Industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun have been quick to develop distributedcomputing infrastructure such as.NET, WebSphere, Web Service Platform, and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition. More and more organizations are adopting Web service protocols, such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) is slowly becoming the standard for describing communication-level mappings of Web service messages to communication protocols. Likewise, business process modeling languages | |||||||||||||||
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