Applications of WSMO - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 160

• Intra-institutional. Banks and other financial institutions usually consist

of several interrelated departments that need to interact in order to pro-
cess daily requests. Each department usually has its own structure and
processing procedure, which means heterogeneities are likely to arise and
hamper successful and effective interaction. Here, semantic technologies
can be used for advanced information management based on ontologies.
Furthermore, if each department were to publish its processing function-
ality as a Web service, service-oriented architectures for managing the
processing procedure of the overall institution could be envisioned.

• Inter-institutional. Financial institutions usually need to cooperate in or-

der to provide their facilities. For instance, money transfers between dif-
ferent banks and exchanging information about the financial standing of
customers, are regular and important procedures in the banking business.
As most interacting institutions will be in different locations, and since
heterogeneities in terminology, data formats, and business processes are
more or less inevitable, a service-oriented architecture based on Semantic
Web service technology appears to be a suitable means to provide adequate
support.

• Customer support. A critical factor for the success and marketability of

banks is sophisticated, high-quality support for their customers - be they
private persons, businesses, or other financial institutions. Here, semantic
technologies can be applied in order to develop advanced customer support
technologies.

The first two aspects relate directly to B2B integration as previously dis-
cussed in Section 11.1.2. In the following, we illustrate the third aspect where
banks can provide new, interesting applications for advanced customer sup-
port enabled by Semantic Web services.
Most banks are organized as commercial businesses. Hence, e ciency with
respect to resources and costs, and nondisclosure of information and pro-
cessing procedures are inevitable requirements for IT. Web services can be
recognized as an appropriate technology, as they merely require to define the
public process for consuming a functionality while internal aspects of how this
functionality is achieved can be kept unpublished. Therefore, we can assume
that convincing banks and other financial-service providers that publishing
their functionality as a Web service is possible, as it does not contradict their
primary interests as commercial businesses.
Having semantic descriptions of the functionalities provided allows the
development of new, interesting applications that provide added value to cus-
tomers. The following describes two of such applications that use WSMO
and are currently under development within the DIP project (see dip.
semanticweb.org ):

• Mortgage comparison. A major area of financial business is the provision,

selling, and management of mortgages. This is a compelling business: the
provider (i.e. the bank) will earn money by selling a mortgage contract,