Semantic web services: standards, applications, challenges and solutions

摘要

Semantic web services, that is, network services that are based on web technologies and leverage semantic annotations to publish their capabilities, represent an approach to share knowledge coming from heterogeneous sources by providing a common knowledge format. This paper presents a review of the state of the art in semantic web services, by focusing on four aspects: (1) Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards of web service technology in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) reference architecture, such as the simple object access protocol (SOAP), the web services description language (WSDL), and the universal description, discovery, and integration registry (UDDI); (2) languages and tools for semantic annotations, such as the resource description framework (RDF), the web ontology language (OWL), and the web service modeling language (WSML); (3) techniques for web services composition, such as the business process execution language for web services (BPEL4WS) and the business process modeling language (BPML); and (4) distributed middleware providing interoperability, such as distributed computing environment (DCE), Java remote method invocation (Java-RMI), distributed component object model (DCOM), and XML web services.