Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
4 Integrating Security, Semantic Web and Web Services
Technologies
Integration of the web services and the semantic web results in semantic web
services. That is, web services to the WWW are semantic web services to
the semantic web. Tim Finin and his team have discussed an architecture
for semantic web services [29]. They have describes the inadequacies of web
services and discussed the need for semantic web services. They state that
current technologies allow usage of Web Services. In particular current web
services support syntactic descriptions as well as syntactic support for service
discovery, composition and execution. They argue that we need semantically
marked up content and services, and therefore we need to develop seman-
tic web services. They then define an architecture called the semantic web
service architecture, which consists of a set of architectural and protocol ab-
stractions that serve as a foundation for Semantic Web service technologies.
These technologies support the following:
Dynamic Service Discovery, Service Engagement, Service process enact-
ment, Community support services and Quality of service.
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Service discovery is the process of identifying candidate services by clients.
Matchmakers connect the service requesters to the providers. Ontologies may
be needed to specify the services. Service engagement specifies the agree-
ments between the requestor and the provider. Therefore contract negation
is carried out during this phase. Once the service is ready to be initiated the
service enactment phase begins. As stated in [4] during this phase Requestor
determines the information necessary to request performance of service and
appropriate reaction to service success or failure. This will also include inter-
preting the responses and carrying out transitions; Community management
services support authentication and security management. Aquatic of service
provides support for negotiation as well as tradeoffs say between security and
timely delivery of the data.
Security cuts across all these services. Note that the community man-
agement service specially calls for authentication and security management.
Security services are needed for service discovery, engine segment, and enact-
ment. For example, not all services can be discovered. This will depend on
the sensitivity of the service and the security credentials possessed by the re-
questor. Therefore, security specifications for XML, RDF and OWL have to
be examined for semantic web service descriptions.
One needs to integrate the diverse and disparate data sources on the web
by invoking secure semantic web services. The data may not be in databases.
It could be in files both structured and unstructured. Data could be in the
form of tables or in the form of text, images, audio and video. Semantic web
technologies such as ontologies are becoming critical for information interop-
erability.
