Tools - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 139

when in fact it is merely the case that the Eclipse framework is used to deploy
the Java Development Environment (JDE). Eclipse can be used to create com-
plex functionalities from simple GUI plug-ins. It allows many different tool
developers to create discrete editors for documents and to create views of the
content contained within those documents. These editors and views can then
be drawn together into a perspective, which gives the collection of plug-ins a
context.
Editors, views and perspectives can be created and integrated with Eclipse
quite simply, by implementing a number of extension points. In general, most
Eclipse plug-ins are shipped alone for individual users to deploy in the Eclipse
instance already installed on their machine. It is also possible to create a
completely branded application containing only the desired plug-ins which
can be shipped to users for installation. This flexibility is leading to many
commercial and research tools being developed for the Eclipse framework and
is resulting in a huge increase in the popularity of Eclipse.
Fig. 10.3. The Eclipse platform and the WSMO tools developed on it
Figure 10.3 shows the various tool sets developed on top of the Eclipse plat-
form. All of the tools are based on two foundational components: the plug-in
framework of the Eclipse platform and the data model provided by the WSMO
API. Together, they provide the possibility to combine the functionality of dif-
ferent tools using features of Eclipse such as a “Perspective”, which configures
multiple views (provided by different sources) into one common application.
The main WSMO tools are depicted by the three boxes on top of the base
layer. The Web Service Modeling Toolkit (WSMT) focuses on providing a
graphically based editing environment with special support for connecting to
execution environments; WSMO Studio is a form-based editing environment
that allows the manipulation of the various WSMO elements; and DOME (Dis-
tributed Ontology Management Environment) provides a tree-based WMSO
editing approach.
10.2.2 WSMT
The Web Service Modeling Toolkit is an open source project 10 that is mainly
driven by members of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). The
10 http://wsmt.sourceforge.net .