Conclusion and Outlook - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 163

concepts, language and usage tasks of a semantically enabled service architec-
ture, aimed towards a future of dynamic collaboration of distributed services.
We face the fact that a fully fledged Semantic Web service framework will
still take some time to be completely realized in terms of standards, products,
and (what we currently call) production systems. So far - as we have outlined
in Part III - there already exist several proof-of-concept applications and tools;
however, these are still the product of research efforts and of specific needs
in niche markets. Nevertheless, these efforts demonstrate in the small the
real potential of Semantic Web services. Adoption in terms of standardization
efforts will hopefully be the next step, and the first step in the direction of
widespread exploitation.
12.1.1 Future Work on WSMO/L/X
The Web Service Modeling Ontology in its current state formalizes all the
main principles that underlie our work and is now very mature. That said,
we do not expect fundamental changes to the conceptual model anymore and
believe that it is in a suitable shape to tackle all of the main problems that
we want to address in such a framework. The effort in terms of the concrete
language of WSML and in terms of tools is still more dynamic. Future work on
WSML will include the application of the language to various use cases and the
improvement of WSML tools, such as editors and reasoners (see Chapter 10).
From a more theoretical point of view, considering language development, the
semantics of WSML-Full has not yet been defined completely; we are currently
investigating several nonmonotonic logics, such as autoepistemic and default
logic and their combinability with purely classical logics in order to close
this gap. There are approaches which combine expressive description logics
with nonmonotonic logic programming without requiring the expressiveness
of WSML-Full (e.g. [35, 118]). Incorporating such approaches into WSML is
a matter of ongoing research. We are also currently working on defining the
operational semantics for Web service capabilities and interface descriptions.
Such an operational semantics is necessary for the automation of several Web-
service-related tasks, such as discovery (see Section 9.2) and composition (see
Section 9.4).
12.2 Standardization Efforts
In Part I of this topic we discussed standard specifications that provide the
basis for Semantic Web services. We made the criticism that until now these
standards have not addressed the semantic gap between heterogenous entities
interacting in a service-oriented architecture. To this end, it can be expected
that a whole set of possible competing proposals for standards will soon be
endorsed by several standardization bodies. As outlined throughout this topic,