Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Tools
In this chapter, we present the tools that help enable Semantic Web services
using WSMO. Although Semantic Web services are fairly recent technologies,
there are many software projects specifically dedicated to providing support
for WSMO and WSML. This chapter is organized as a survey of existing
support tools. We divide our analysis into three parts: first we look at in-
frastructure components such as parsers, and standard libraries, then we list
the available design-time components for creating semantic descriptions, and
finally we present the two major execution environments that are based upon
WSMO.
10.1 Infrastructure
An essential precondition for any technology to be adopted is an infrastructure
in terms of reusable software libraries. This basic software component enables
both academia and business to start experimenting with a technology and to
exploit it in specific application scenarios.
If one takes for example the XML technology, it is quite easy to get started.
First off, there are a wide range of editors available, from commercial offerings
for several hundreds of euros to numerous open source projects. Equally im-
portant as the editors are the widely accepted libraries for working program-
matically with XML. One need no longer code ones own implementations,
but can instead choose between existing implementations that already pro-
vide a basic functionality for parsing, validation, and manipulation of XML
documents. Furthermore, there is support available in the form of higher-level
processers (e.g. SAXON
1
for XSLT). The tool support available has signifi-
cantly lowered the entry barrier for using XML technology.
This model can be applied similarly to the Semantic Web: a language or
conceptual model gets adopted as soon as the basic infrastructure is in place.
1
http://saxon.sourceforge.net/
.
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