Thursday 31 July 2008

What about open standards?

There is a great many standards under development for supporting the Semantic Web, specifically to support web services in an open environment. Of course, we are all familiar with XML Schema, WSDL, OWL and others. We have a web service stack and a semantic web stack for showing how these standards all relate. These days, Semantic Web Services are fairly new, but do we have a Semantic Web Service Stack? New standards need to be developed with their accompanying tool support to support Semantic Web Services. SAWSDL, WSML, and WSMO are but a few examples of these standards. Do we all have to use these standards, what is their overlap if any, are some of the questions that we could ask ourselves.
To be brief, we need a framework to identify the functionality of open standards. Do frameworks already exist? What do they cater for and are standards already grouped according to those frameworks. I know of some frameworks, most of them being specified for organizations and not tailored for behavior between organization (or any systems). From science, some parts are already available, e.g. those focusing on process aspects. My suggestion would be to develop a framework to specify external behavior. If any one is familiar with such a framework, let me know.

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