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» Requirements from Industry
» Vision of the Semantic Web
» Service Oriented Architecture
» Semantic Web Services
» How to enable Semantic Web Services
» Market Expectations - Roadmap
Business in Semantic Web Service (SWS) delivery will be based on extensions of existing infrastructure, thus a roadmap for evolution is of crucial importance for business development. If will identify the time-to-market of the elements necessary to realise service delivery based on SWS. Our roadmap comes from a Telecom point-of-view and covers the major items:
- Standardisation is required in order to establish a new service generation, here: Semantic Web Services. Telecom operators as the likely owners of semantic service platforms need to make services future proof.
- Experiences from platform development are used from operators to define their technology strategy, thus deciding when to move towards a new technology.
- Service Development of prototype services will be used to experience the complexity, and thus establish knowledge on the requirements for mass-market end-user services.
- The Business rollout will require professional tools for ontology and service developments. First when the infrastructure is in place, market expectations and business cases can be performed for a specific set of envisaged rollout services.
The following subchapters will discuss in more detail the expectations and the market view, and finally discuss the critical factors of the roadmap.
The trend toward Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and implicit semantic based services is obvious. All major IT companies, i.e. IBM, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle standardise their architectures towards semantically defined interfaces. Without neglecting the other initiatives, we would like to mention the enterprise service architecture (ESA) initiative from SAP and Microsoft in order to harmonise their software packages. Our ASG platform is a SOA implementation, and the platform prototype has advanced functionality, i.e. negotiation of non-functional-properties as compared to a conventional SOA platform.
Figure: Roadmap of ASG based Semantic Web Services
For ASG based semantic services, prototype development is well under way. First demonstrations of platform functionality have been presented in Q3.2005. Tools for ontology developments in WSMO have currently been prototyped and are expected to reach the developer market within mid 2006. More crucial are domain ontologies, standardisation, and the service inclusion through existing platforms. Only preliminary actions have started, and suggest that domain ontologies for prototype services will be available by mid 2007. Standardisation is expected to happen until 2008. Substantial market penetration will then follow in the years afterwards.
The expectations presented earlier are optimistic. When and how SWS will be adopted by the market is not easy to foresee. The two main factors which need to be fulfilled are standardisation and development of ontologies. Current standardisation (status Q1.2006) is still discussing competing concepts, and has not focussed on one solution.
What is even more critical is the development of ontologies for the respective domains, e.g. the Telecom domain. It is hampered by the various approaches to describe an ontology, specifically WSMO versus OWL-S, and the lack of prototype platforms to prototype services. Both lack of standardisation and lack of ontologies might delay the roll-out of SWS substantially.
An additional factor is the evolution path from current service infrastructure to a semantic based service delivery. Companies require that current services will be maintained, while new services are given to the market. Even though prototypical implementations of SWS are ongoing, substantial commercial roll-out might come not earlier than 2012.
(see presentation  Roadmap*)
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