Applications of WSMO - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 155

to develop a next-generation EAI technology by providing seamless access in-
terfaces to computational facilities. Along with means for ad-hoc usage and
combination and support for web-based information exchange, they shall serve
as the basis for service-oriented architectures over the Web. This means that
enterprises publish the access points and public processes of their function-
alities as Web services, which are then invocable over the Web, possibly as
composed or complex functionalities. However, as discussed in detail earlier,
the initial Web Service Technology Stack allows the setting up of Web ser-
vices for Web-based access to a computational facility with a standardized
usage interface (i.e. the WSDL description). However, this does not address
the problem of handling heterogeneities that hamper information interchange
and automated interaction within and between businesses.
In order to illustrate how Semantic Web services and, especially, the
WSMO framework and technologies can be used to provide adequate solutions
to this problem, we shall describe an EAI problem in the telecommunications
industry as presented in [34]. To stay competitive in the future market, many
Internet service providers (ISPs) are extending their businesses by the whole-
saling of mobile and landline telephone services and unbundled data lines.
Least Cost Supply Management (LCSM) is a methodology that offers the
possibility to select the best supplier in terms of price and quality for specific
product bundles; therefore technologies for easy and flexible integration of
suppliers that offer these services are needed.
Let uss consider a virtual Internet service providers (VISP) that provides
ISP bundles to customers on the basis of LCSM by detecting and aggregating
offers from other providers. As in the real world, the parties involved might
use different, incompatible systems. Therefore, a WSMO-enabled VISP plat-
form mediates communication between the technical systems of the VISP, the
suppliers, and the internal systems of the ISPs. Figure 11.1 gives an overview
of the scenario for a customer requesting a broadband Internet package in the
form of a flow-chart with the following central processing steps: 1

1. A customer buys a broadband Internet package from the VISP.
2. This package is recognized as a VISP product by the VISP enterprise
resource planing (ERP) system.

1 Some names and abbreviations used in Fig. 11.1 are the following:

• Apache. An open source Web server, see: www.apache.org .

• SAP. An enterprise resource planing (ERP) system provided by SAP, see: http:

//www.sap.com/solutions .

• CCBS. abbreviation for “Call Completion on Busy Subscriber”, a telecommuni-

cation management technology.

• Biztalk. an application integration platform provided by Microsoft, see: www.

biztalk.org .

• Websphere. an application server provided by IBM, see www.ibm.com/software/

websphere .