The mission of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to establish semantics as a core pillar of modern computer engineering. This need arises from the fact that IT systems get interwoven on a world wide scale and this layering requires significant human support. It would be more efficient if system interoperability could be mechanised. This mechanisation can only be achieved through the self description of data and processes, namely by adding semantics to them.
Achieving semantic description of computing is a stepwise process. It started with the Semantic Web, took the next step with Semantic Web Services, and it is currently in a transition period towards Semantically Enabled Service-oriented Architectures (SESA).
Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, referred to the future of the current World Wide Web as the "Semantic Web" - an extended Web of machine-readable information and automated services that extend far beyond current capabilities. The explicit representation of the semantics underlying data, programs, pages, and other Web resources, will enable a knowledge-based Web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. Automated services will improve in their capacity to assist humans in achieving their goals by "understanding" more of the content on the Web, and thus providing more accurate filtering, categorization, and searches of information sources. This process will ultimately lead to an extremely knowledgeable system that features various specialized reasoning services. These services will support us in nearly all aspects of our daily life - making access to information as pervasive, and necessary, as access to electricity is today.
The current Web is mainly a collection of flat or one-dimensional information. It does not yet provide support in processing this information - adding an extra dimension. Nor does it allow the computer to be used as a computational device. Recent efforts around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP have tried to lift the Web to a new level of service. Software applications can be accessed and executed via the Web based on the idea of Web services. Web services can significantly increase the Web architecture's potential, by providing a way of automated program communication, discovery of services, etc. Consequently, they are the focus of much interest from various software development companies. Web Services connect computers and devices to each other using the Internet to exchange data and combine data in new ways. The key to the real potential of Web Services will be on-the-fly software composition through the use of loosely coupled, reusable software components. This will have fundamental implications in both technical and business terms. Software will be delivered and paid for as fluid streams of services as opposed to packaged products. It is possible to achieve automatic, ad hoc interoperability between systems to accomplish organizational tasks. Still, more work needs to be done before the Web service infrastructure can make this vision come true. Current web service technology provides limited support in mechanizing service recognition, service configuration and combination (i.e., realizing complex workflows and business logics with Web services), service comparison and automated negotiation. In a business environment, the vision of flexible and autonomous Web service translates into automatic cooperation between enterprise services. Any enterprise requiring a business interaction with another enterprise can automatically discover and select the appropriate optimal Web services relying on selection policies. Services can be invoked automatically and payment processes can be initiated. Any necessary mediation would be applied based on data and process ontologies and the automatic translation and semantic interoperation.
Computer science is entering a new paradigm. The previous paradigm was based on abstracting from hardware. The emerging one comes from abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). "A Service-Oriented Architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed." In a world of services, users are concerned only about the services and not about any software or hardware components that implement the service. Service-Oriented Computing is rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm.
A service-oriented world will have billions of services. Computation will involve services searching for services based on functional and non-functional requirements and interoperating with those that they select. However, services will not be able to interact automatically and SOAs will not scale without signification mechanization of service discovery, negotiation, adaptation, composition, invocation, and monitoring. Additionally service interaction will require further data, protocol, and process mediation. Hence, machine processable semantics are critical for the next generation of computing - SOAs - to reach its full potential. Only with semantics can critical subtasks can be automated leaving people to focus on problem solving.
The goal of Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architectures (SESA) is to place semantics at the core of computer science in order to realize the potential of the next generation of computing. What has started as semantic annotation of data and semantic service endpoint specification will be transformed into a next generation operating system that provides seamless and transparent integration of billions of services on a global scale. Semantic descriptions will enable computing to become a utility, just as electricity is today.