Applying Semantic SOA Based Model to Business Applications - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 3

bAckground of global infrastructures for sharing documents and

data, to ease and make the information searching
and reusability more efficacious.
However, from one side the new emerging
technologies in the world of Semantic Web makes
the Semantic SOA techniques seem to be inac-
curate to be used in terms of semanticizing the
capabilities of Web Services and the requests of WS
consumers because of the blurred representation
of the involved ontology. And from the other side,
traditional SOA-based solutions lack semantic
documentation of WS interfaces (Mahmoud &
Marx Gómez, 2008a), and that will return inac-
curate information to the consumer.
Based on that, our proposed light weight
Semantic SOA-based model will have the re-
sponsibility of splitting the semantic annotation
from the core services in a way that both normal
and Semantic Web Services (Studer, Grimm &
Abecker, 2007) can be validated (Maximilien &
Munindar, 2004) and used. This model will also
provide a second level of WS classification by
grouping Web Services in categories based on the
area of interest named “WS clouds” which will
entail their concepts from a predefined ontology,
and this will be explained in details later in this
chapter.
The rest of this chapter is structured as fol-
lows. As we intend to analyze the work that had
been done in this domain we give an overview
(section two) on the background information of
SOA and its drawbacks, Semantic Web Services,
main conceptual frameworks and their semantic
execution environments. Afterwards, section three
describes the methodology and the specifications
of the proposed semantic SOA-based model we
are developing as a work on progress. Section four
summarizes the main outcomes behind semantic
SOA-based model. Then we will provide our future
research directions related to this model in section
five and how we can enhance the efficiency and
the performance in it, and an overall conclusion
will be given in section six.

service oriented Architecture
and its drawbacks

Talking about Web Services, there are a lot of
definitions that are describing the term of Web
Services such as: a Web Service is a business
function made available via the Internet by a
service provider and accessible by clients that
could be human users or software applications
(Casati & Shan, 2001). It is defined by the W3C
consortium as: a software system designed to sup-
port interoperable machine to machine interaction
over a network (Booth et al., 2004). It can be also
described as business functionalities that are:

• Programmatically Accessible: Web

Services are mainly designed to be invoked
by other Web Services and applications.
They are distributed over the Web and ac-
cessible via widely deployed protocols
such as HTTP and SMTP. Web Services
must describe their capabilities to other
services including their operations, input
and output messages, and the way they can
be invoked.

• Loosely Coupled: Communication among

Web Services is document-based. Web
Services generally communicate with each
other by exchanging XML documents. The
use of a document-based communication
model provides loosely coupled relation-
ships among Web Services.

Web Service is the main unit inside SOA and
conceptually the main components in the SOA
architecture are (Brehm et al., 2008):

• Web Service Provider: It creates a Web

Service and possibly publishes its inter-
face and access information to the service
registry.