Conclusion and Outlook - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 164

different aspects of Semantic Web service technologies present themselves at
different levels of maturity at present.
The results relating to standards for ontology languages are quite mature,
although some aspects, such as a Web enabled rule extension, have not yet
been finalized.
The work on the overall framework for Semantic Web services is not as
mature yet. In summer 2005, the W3C organized a workshop on Frameworks
for Semantics in Web Services 1 to clarify the various views of the community
and explore current chances for standardization. Over 80 participants from
industry and academia presented their proposals, but despite many conceptual
overlaps, one intention of the workshop was not achieved: The community was
still far from agreement on the details of the technologies to be deployed, and
therefore not ready for a rapid move towards standardization. Still, the strong
industrial participation and the active contribution from global players showed
once more that the problems that Semantic Web services are trying to solve
are key aspects of today's IT business.
Although activities towards standardizing an overall framework for Se-
mantic Web services have been stalled by the W3C for the moment, stan-
dardization organizations such as the Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards (OASIS) 2 and also W3C itself have in the
meantime established several working groups or technical committees to de-
velop and standardize particular aspects of Semantic Web service technologies,
as presented in this topic.
For instance, most of the ongoing architectural effort on the Web Service
Execution Environment (WSMX) has in the meantime moved to the Seman-
tic Execution Environment Technical Committee (SEE TC) of OASIS. For the
individual WSMX components outlined in this topic, there is currently major
progress and we have probably not been able to cover all the latest develop-
ments. Still, we can predict theat we shall be able to choose between several
alternative industrial strength implementations and strategies for every task
and component within a few years.
While the SEE TC of OASIS focuses on the development of a reference
execution environment for a semantically enhanced service-oriented architec-
ture, several other groups are working on other important related aspects.
Within OASIS itself, various committees are working mainly on architec-
ture related issues:
The OASIS SOA Reference Model (RM) Technical Committee is chartered
to develop a reference model for serviceoriented architectures. The OASIS
Electronic Business Service-Oriented Architecture (ebSOA) Technical Com-
mittee focuses on continuing work on the ebXML technical architecture to
bring it into a more up-to-date form that takes into account subsequent re-
1 http://www.w3.org/2005/01/ws-swsf-cfp.html .
2 http://www.oasis-open.org .