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In this chapter we have answered the Question III.1: We have opted for an application server, but have come to the conclusion that other platforms would benefit from semantic technology as well. The next question we have answered in this chapter is III.2: We have seen that there are many potential sources that allow the (semi) automatic obtaining of semantic descriptions. Therefore, the number of manually provided descriptions can be kept small. We have then moved on to design an ontology-based application server that supports the semantic management of components and services. The resulting architecture is rather generic but provides a number of components to support application development in the Semantic Web (as introduced in our scenario in Chapter 4, Section 1.1). The following chapter presents a possible implementation of this design.

In this chapter we have analyzed whether existing ontologies are suitable for our purposes, thus answering the Question II.1: We have inspected one of the earliest and most prominent Web service ontologies, viz., OWL-S, as well as our own initial ontology of software components. We conclude that both are a big step forward with design principles suitable also for our purposes. Their reuse is possible in principle. However, both ontologies exhibit shortcomings that stand in conflict with our goals of having a high-quality, reference and heavyweight ontology. Their problems are very common also in more recent efforts (some of them are discussed in the related work chapter). We further conclude that most of the problems could have been avoided if a foundational ontology had been used as a modelling basis. Thus, the remainder of this part designs a new management ontology on the basis of a foundational ontology.