August 28, 2007 is a special day for our research group (METEOR-S project, LSDIS lab and Kno.e.sis Center). On this day, we saw the culmination of an activity I started a little over three years ago. In July 2004, we wrote a white paper"
WSDL-S: Adding Semantics to WSDL - White Paper". In November 2005, in collaboration with IBM, we made a W3C member submission
Web Service Semantics - WSDL-S. Our presentation at a W3C workshop held at Innsbruck received support from a number of key members of Semantic Web Services community that includes the OWL-S, WSMO and SWSF groups, which then led to the
Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) Working Group in which Kno.e.sis (at Wright State University - a W3C member) and LSDIS (at the University of Georgia) also participated. After timely and extensive contributions of working group members (and especially the groups chair and editors- Jacek, Joel and Holger), the W3C declared
Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema as a recommendation.
Interested readers can find more details in the Internet Computing column I wrote with my former advisee and a key early technical contributor to our work in this area, Kunal Verma (Semantically Annotating a Web Service), by giving this tutorial at Semantic Technology conference (Using SAWSDL for Semantic Service Interoperability), or by playing with implementations and test suites.
So what's next? My own group has defined SA-REST (more on this soon), and Charles Petrie and I have started (with healthy dose of encouragement from Dieter Fensel) a W3C SWS Testbed Incubator Group to develop the awareness and further agreements on post-SAWSDL issues that we have to address before more developers will find Semantic Web Services ready for the prime time.
