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The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.

In this chapter, we have briefly recapitulated the history of the current Web and outlined its most substantial developments and success factors. The traditional Web is based on three main building blocks: global identification of resources via URIs, a simple client-server-based protocol for persistent publication of globally accessible data (HTTP), and an easy-to-use language for creating interlinked hypertext documents (HTML).

Standardization is the key for technologies such as the Web in reaching their current level of success and interoperability. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) and other standardization bodies are working towards the continuous progress of Web-related standards, by controlling accessability and compliance with basic Web principles.

As we have seen, a first step towards the next generation of the Web and a more strict separation between content and layout has already been taken with the introduction of XML and the related family of standards, of which we have sketched a few. As we shall see in the following chapters, however, this takes us only halfway towards real machine-processable Web content and interoperable services. We need to bring back the computer as a device for computation and assistance to help us deal better with the rapidly growing amount of information available on the Web.

Note that unlike other documents in the literature, we do not include XML per se in the “Semantic Web”, but instead consider the family of standards around XML as an intermediate step towards a real machine-processable Web infrastructure.

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.

In this chapter we have exhaustively introduced all elements relevant to the WSMO framework. We have done this in a semiformal fashion using the UML-based Meta-Object Facility. By separating the model from the language used to implement it, this provides significantly more freedom then other competing approaches (see Chapter 8).

Among the guiding principles we have presented Web compliance, which will be very prominent in the next chapter, which introduces the concrete language for WSML. Aspects of the Semantic Web are represented mainly by introducing an epistemological model for ontologies and by using elements of this model for refining other aspects such as capabilities through logical expressions.

We have not yet made the relationship between the WSMO model and Web service technology in the sense of WSDL explicit. The reason is that (1) WSMO, used as a conceptual model to describe services, is independent of the concrete technology used to implement them, and (2) this relationship (grounding) is, in our context, only relevant to actual Web service execution and not essential for an overall understanding. Information about grounding can be found in Section 9.5.

In this chapter, we have presented the Web Service Modeling Language, WSML, a language for the specification of various aspects of Semantic Web services, based on WSMO. WSML brings together different logical-language paradigms and unifies them into one syntactical framework, enabling the reuse of proven reasoning techniques and tools. Unlike other proposals for the Semantic Web and Semantic Web service languages, WSML has a normative human-readable syntax that makes a separation between conceptual and logical syntax, thereby enabling conceptual modeling according to a language-independent metamodel (WSMO), while not restricting the expressiveness of the language for the expert user. With the use of IRIs (the successor of URIs) and the use of XML and RDF, WSML is a language based on the principles of the Semantic Web and allows seamless integration with other Semantic Web languages and applications.

The definition of an interoperability layer between the description logic and rules paradigms (i.e. WSML-Core) enables the use and extension of the same core ontology for a number of different reasoning tasks supported by a number of different reasoners, most notably subsumption reasoning using description logic reasoners and query answering using logic programming reasoners.

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project at UCLA includes a survey aimed at providing a base line study of the impact of technology on business practice. The study documents the information technology driven changes that are occurring across a wide spectrum of industry sectors in the United States and Canada. Changes in the nature of the workplace, B2C relationships, the structure of business processes in terms of B2B relationships, technology adoption and globalization are observed. The results indicate that businesses are changing internally as well as in terms of their interactions with their customers and trading partners. As might be expected, the rate of change is perhaps not as rapid as might be suggested by the “high water mark” e are described in the popular business press. However, the changes are without question both pervasive and on-going.