Conclusion and Outlook - Enabling Semantic Web Services: The Web Service Modeling Ontology - page 166

within OASIS and W3C. A review of the hundreds of standards related to Web
services and SOAs is beyond the scope of this final chapter. However, we have
noted the most important ones. At the end of 2005, Web service and SOA
standards efforts were being commenced, as vendors recognize that without
reasonable, effective, and agreed standards, SOA technology will not progress
and customers will neither purchase nor deploy SOA solutions.
12.3 Industrial Collaboration
Even when a so-called standard is in place, this is only a prerequisite for the
success of a technology, and not a guarantee by any means. The eventual
criterion for success that Semantic Web service technology has to face will
be industrial adoption. While scalability and precision are the foci of current
industrial efforts related to Web services and service-oriented architectures,
the more fundamental goal of enabling Semantic Web services is at the core
of our research interests, as outlined in this topic.
The challenge for the research and industrial communities over the next
few years will be to collaboratively realize the concepts described in this topic.
This challenge involves two ongoing and complementary paradigm shifts in
computing: (1) the movement to service-orientation, and (2) the use of se-
mantic technologies and ontologies in industrial-scale infrastructures and ap-
plications. Achieving such a goal will require collaboration not only within
the research community, but also among the global players in industry. To
achieve what we consider true realization - defined not in terms of purely
research prototypes but in terms of industrial-scale production applications -
collaboration between the research and industrial communities is essential.
This will require research to understand the state and nature of the rele-
vant industrial problems, products, and solutions. It will require industry to
understand the relevant challenges and opportunities to which research can
contribute. It will require researchers to collaborate with industry so that re-
search results can be achieved and then integrated into industrial solutions.
Among other things, work has to be done on industrial-standard ontologies
that annotate the most common business concepts and standards. Examples
of such common concepts are ordering and billing in various domains such
as manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, inventory, and tourism. The
hope is that as soon as we have reached a critical mass of semantic annotations,
the effort required to adapt concepts to a new domain or specific business will
be significantly reduced, and benefits will outweigh the cost of creating the
necessary descriptions for Semantic Web services. Low entry barriers and high
benefits are a key prerequisite for any new technology.
This challenge of collaboration has been recognized in the European Union.
The European Commission is funding several large integrated projects and
strategic research projects that aim to facilitate development in precisely this
direction.