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ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1 Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), pp. 26-37

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SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES AND ITS CHALLENGES

Ms. A. Suganthy Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Institute of Engg. & Tech Karaikal, E-mail:asugan@gmail.com G.S.Sumithra Department of Computer Science and Engineering Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Institute of Engg. & Tech Karaikal, E-mail: teju_tiny@yahoo.co.in J.Hindusha Department of Computer Science and Engineering Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Institute of Engg. & Tech Karaikal, E-mail:hindu.hindusha@gmail.com A.Gayathri Department of Computer Science and Engineering Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Institute of Engg. & Tech Karaikal, E-mail: ggayathri.pkiet@gmail.com S.Girija Department of Computer Science and Engineering Perunthalaivar Kamarajar Institute of Engg. & Tech Karaikal, E-mail:girija.siva89@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Semantic web technology has drawn a considerable attention of the researchers in the field of distributed information systems, artificial intelligence and so on. Researchers are taking interest to make use of semantic web technology as a central component of their software constructions. This paper gives an overview of Semantic web and web services, semantic web technologies, semantic web architecture, semantic web approaches and key challenges. Keywords Ontology; Semantic Web services; Web services

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

I.INTRODUCTION
It is obvious in modern computing. Semantic web services shares the documents across the heterogeneous and global networks. It is a cooperative convergence of the semantic web and web services. Semantic web deals about ontologies, logic, inference and software agents. Web services are an infrastructure for developing the distributed applications. Semantic Web Services are web services which have been marked and

annotated with machine-interpretable semantic markup in the form of ontologies. One definition is the augmentation of descriptions through semantic web annotations, to facilitate the higher automation of service discovery, composition, invocation and monitoring in an open, unregulated, and often chaotic environment. [10]. Section2 discusses about the web services and the semantic webs. Section3 describes the technologies used in semantic web services. Section4 and section 5 discuss about semantic web architecture and approaches. Section 6 describe about semantic web challenges.

II.WEB SERVICES AND SEMANTIC WEB

This section discusses about Web Services and architecture of Web Services.

1. Web Services
The term Web services describes a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol. XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, WSDL is used for describing the services available and UDDI is used for listing what services are available. Web services are used primarily as a means for businesses to communicate with each other and with clients, Web services allows organizations to communicate data without intimate knowledge of each other's IT systems behind the firewall [1]. Web services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without time-consuming custom coding, and because all communication is in XML, Web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language. For example, Java can talk with Perl; Windows applications can talk with UNIX applications. [1]

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

The figure1 shows the basic architecture of Web Services. As illustrated in figure 1, the major components in the Web service architecture are service provider, service requester and service broker. This Figure1 shows that service providers publish their service(s) with the registry repository of a service broker. Then, a service requestor initiates a search for a service by contacting the service broker and searching the registry repository for services that meet specific search criteria.

Figure 1 Web service architecture The broker returns a list of services along with details of the associated provider for each service. Subsequently, the service requestor binds with a selected service provider(s) based on the provided details of registry repository and consumes them. In the mentioned scenario, there are series of standards and protocols which enable communication, description, publication and discovery of Web services.[1]

2. Semantic Web
Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning or "semantics" of information on the World Wide Web. The term was coined by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee. According to the original vision, the availability of machine-readable metadata would enable automated agents and other software to access the Web more intelligently. The agents would be able to perform tasks automatically and locate related information on behalf of the user. Semantic web researchers have proposed to augment web services with a semantic description of their functionality in order to facilitate their discovery and integration. The combination of web services with semantic web technology is referred as Semantic Web Services. [11] 28

International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

While the term "Semantic Web" is not formally defined it is mainly used to describe the model and technologies proposed by the W3C. These technologies include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML-eXtensible Markup Language , N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain. Many of the technologies proposed by the W3C already exist and are used in various projects. The Semantic Web as a global vision, however, has remained largely unrealized and its critics have questioned the feasibility of the approach. The semantic web provides the ability to add semantics to web services. First we have OWL and its predecessor DAML+OIL (Ontology Inference Layer), both of which are XML languages for representing ontologys in the web. These technologies are used to build upon the existing web services technologies to create semantic web services. [2].

III. SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES

Various technologies are used in Semantic Web Services. The major Semantic Web Technologies that are described in this section are WSDL, OIL, SOAP, UDDI.

1. WSDL (Web Services Definition Language)

It is an XML based References language for describing web services. Interfaces to all publicly available functions Data types for all message requests and message responses Binding to the transport protocol to be used Addresses for locating the specified services

2. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

It is a XML protocol web service communication and invocation. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a lightweight, XML-based protocol for exchanging information in a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP supports different styles of information exchange, including: Remote Procedure Call style (RPC) and Message-oriented exchange. RPC style information exchange allows for request-response processing, where an endpoint receives a procedure-oriented message

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

and replies with a correlated response message. Message-oriented information exchange supports organizations and applications that need to exchange business or other types of documents where a message is sent but the sender may not expect or wait for an immediate response.

3. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registry is a collection of information on all the registered Web services. It enables dynamically discovering Web Services providers. UDDI is a free public registry - vendors publish their Web services and consumers search for appropriate Web services. It has three components: UDDI is relatively lightweight, and contains enough information to direct users to Resources hosted outside of it. It uses XML to represent its contents.

4. OIL (Ontology Inference Layer)

OIL can be regarded as an ontology infrastructure for the Semantic web. It is based on concepts developed in Description Logic (DL) and frame-based systems and is compatible with RDFS.

IV.SEMANTIC WEB ARCHITECTURE

The architecture of semantic web is illustrated in the figure below:

Figure 2 Semantic web architecture

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

The first layer, URI and Unicode, follows the important features of the existing WWW. Unicode is a standard of encoding international character sets and it allows that all human languages can be used (written and read) on the web using one standardized form. Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of a standardized form that allows to uniquely identify resources (e.g., documents). A subset of URI is Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which contains access mechanism and a (network) location of a document - such as http://www.example.org/. Another subset of URI is URN that allows to identify a resource without implying its location and means of dereferencing it - an example is urn:isbn:0-123-45678-9. The usage of URI is important for a distributed internet system as it provides understandable identification of all resources. An international variant to URI is Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) that allows usage of Unicode characters in identifier and for which a mapping to URI is defined. In the rest of this text, whenever URI is used, IRI can be used as well as a more general concept. Extensible Markup Language (XML) layer with XML namespace and XML schema definitions makes sure that there is a common syntax used in the semantic web. XML is a general purpose markup language for documents containing structured information. An XML document contains elements that can be nested and that may have attributes and content. XML namespaces allows to specify different markup vocabularies in one XML document. XML schema serves for expressing schema of a particular set of XML documents. A core data representation format for semantic web is Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a framework for representing information about resources in a graph form. It was primarily intended for representing metadata about WWW resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, but it can be used for storing any other data. It is based on triples subject-predicate-object that form graph of data. All data in the semantic web use RDF as the primary representation language. The normative syntax for serializing RDF is XML in the RDF/XML form. Formal semantics of RDF is defined as well. RDF itself serves as a description of a graph formed by triples. Anyone can define vocabulary of terms used for more detailed description. To allow standardized description 31

International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

of taxonomies and other ontological constructs, a RDF Schema (RDFS) was created together with its formal semantics within RDF. RDFS can be used to describe taxonomies of classes and properties and use them to create lightweight ontologies. The OWL is a language derived from description logics, and offers more constructs over RDFS. It is syntactically embedded into RDF, so like RDFS, it provides additional standardized vocabulary. OWL comes in three species - OWL Lite for taxonomies and simple constrains, OWL DL for full description logic support, and OWL Full for maximum expressiveness and syntactic freedom of RDF. Since OWL is based on description logic, it is not surprising that a formal semantics is defined for this language. RDFS and OWL have semantics defined and this semantics can be used for reasoning within ontologies and knowledge bases described using these languages. To provide rules beyond the constructs available from these languages, rule languages are being standardized for the semantic web as well. Two standards are emerging - RIF and SWRL.

V.SEMANTIC WEB APPROACHES

Here we discuss about the Semantic Web approaches namely Annotation, Composition, Privacy and Security. 1. Annotation Annotation of web services is the fundamental concepts underlying semantic web services. DAML-S and OWL-S has been the most popular representations of web service ontology but they are not without flaws, competitors and possible improvements. [2] 2. Composition The OWL-S proposal [7] describes composite services thus: complex or composite services are composed of multiple mode primitive services, and may require an extended interaction or conversation between the requester and the set of services that are being utilized. The need for composing services comes from web services. The BPEL4WS is one language which attempts to enable composition of web services into executable processes. In Semantic Web Services composition is performed automatically by the system based only on declarative descriptions of the task and services.

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

3. Privacy and Security Privacy and Security work has mostly taken the form of policy languages with which to annotate services. Security information includes encryption and digital signature information about how inputs /outputs will be passed and stored. It also includes information about to where information may be sent and for what purpose. Kagal et al. [5] describes policies for authorization and privacy for SWS which aims to provide security and policy annotations for OWL-S service descriptions. Denker et al. [3] proposes security ontologies to annotate web services with security information and describes a prototype. Tontietal. [15] compares three languages for policy representation: KaoS,Rei and Ponder.

V. KEY CHALLENGES
The most probable achievements that the SWS research community is expected to make by 2012, the potential of SWSs with respect to integration architectures and the availability of real-world studies in which SWS- based integration architectures are used. [ 3] Since 2001, the number of publications devoted to SWSs is constantly growing. Mcllraith et al. (2001) published one of the first scientific articles on SWSs. A Google Scholar query for SWS-related articles in Six matches for the year 2001. For the years 2004 and 2005, Google Scholar lists 189 and 344 articles, respectively. In 2006 the query results in 426 matches and in 2007 the query results in 458 publications.[10] Figure 3 described the evolution of the web which consists largely of documents for humans to read to a Semantic Web that includes data and information for computers to manipulate. The existing applications have been developed in academic contexts or research projects funded by public institutions. Work on Semantic Web languages and standards provide a set of metadata to be used, nor do they say anything about how metadata can be obtained [ 3]. Semantic Web provides some languages that express information in a machine processable format. This implies that we do still have more expectations from our

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

computers today; we would like to take more benefit from their processing power. This idea is also one goal of the Grand Challenges in the Evolution of Information Society [17].

Figure 3 Berners-Lee Semantic Web The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who has been working intensively on Semantic standards, has approved the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) and hence provides a solid base to establish enterprise semantic applications and has implied a significant leverage of the Semantic Web from a research level to an industry standard for building next generation applications. Like other technologies, the interest in creating and developing the Semantic Web is motivated by the opportunities it might bring: either it can solve old problems, or it can solve old problem in a better way. Here, instead of enumerating all the opportunities enabled by the Semantic Web, we focus our discussion on the following closely related aspects: web-services, agent-based distributed computing, semantics-based web search engines, and semantics-based digital libraries [13]. Only limited semantics can be derived from the lexical or syntactic content of the web pages. Several systems have been built to overcome these problems based on their idea of annotating Web pages with special HTML tags to represent semantics, including SHOE (Simple HTML Ontology Extensions) system.[8].

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

New opportunities impose new challenges. In the following, we focus our discussion on the following challenges that we are facing now: the development of ontologies, and the development of the formal semantics of Semantic Web languages, and the development of trust and proof models.[13]. The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The intent of this challenge is to explore the trade-offs among existing approaches. Typically, we only run one surprise problem at a workshop due to resource restrictions, but there may be exceptions to this practice. The process is summarized in the table 1. Description Committed participants will receive "Code freeze" (1) Deadline Day 0 instructions and credentials for the credentials distribution Phase 2. "Code freeze" The deadline for existing solution (2) Day 1 submission submissions. Committed participants will gain Surprise problem (3) Day 2 access to the surprise problem announcement description. The deadline for surprise problem Day 2 + n - depending (4) Solution submission upon the problem solution submissions. The surprise problem solutions (5) Next Day Solution verification verification report. Table 1: Surprise problem solution A solution submission should be accompanied with a document clearly stating all changes that were introduced to the frozen version in order to respond to the surprise problem requirements. Further, we may ask at the workshop that participants dynamically demonstrate the ability to make minor changes to the surprise problem and get the new correct answer [15]. The overall objective of the challenge is to apply Semantic Web techniques in building online end-user applications that integrate, combine and deduce information needed to assist users in performing tasks. Intentionally, the challenge does not define specific task, data set, application domain or technology to be used because the potential Date/Time Phase

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

applicability of the Semantic Web is very broad. Instead, a number of minimal criteria have been defined which allow people to submit a broad range of applications.

VI. CONCLUSION
Semantic Web Service is an emerging technology for supporting distributed computing in the environments like Internet. Research is going on to formulate a standardized architecture for Semantic Web. And the Framework for describing the Ontology is also not well defined. There are still many issues to be resolved. The Semantic Web Technologies are all new and demands its own requirements.

VII. REFERENCES
1. Berners-Lee, T, Hendler, James and Miller, E (2002). Integrating Applications on the Semantic Web," Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, October, 2002. 2. Berners-Lee, Tim; James Hendler and Ora Lassila (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American Magazine. Retrieved March 26, 2008. 3. Daniel Bachlechner,Kerstin Fink,Semantic Web Service Research: Current Challenges and Proximate Achievements Semantic Web services.

4. David Brokenshire,Surrey BC V3T 5X3, A Review of 5. Denker. G., Kagal, L., Finin, T., Paolucci, M., and

Sycara,K. security for DAML

Web services: Annotation and Matchmaking, Vol. 2870.Jan 2003. 6. Jagadeesh Nandigam, Venkat Ngidivada, Mrunalini Kalavala Semantic Web Services 7. Kagal, L, Finin, T., Paolucci, M., Srinivasan,N.Sycara, K., and Denker,G. authorization and Privacy for Semantic Web Services. Intelligent Systems, IEEE (see also IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications) 19, 4 (2004). 8. Luke, S., Spector, L., Rager, D. & Hendler, J. (1997). "Ontology-based web agents". In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, California, pp. 59-68 New York, NY: ACM press. 9. Martin, D.,Paolucci, M.,Mcllraith, S.A.,Burstein, M,; McGuinness, D., Parsia, B.; Payne, T., Sabou,M.;Solanki,M.,Srinivasan, N.,Sycara,K. (2004): Bringing

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International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology (IJCET), ISSN 0976 6367(Print), ISSN 0976 6375(Online) Volume 1, Number 2, Sep - Oct (2010), IAEME

Semantics to Web Services: the OWL-S approach, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantic Web services and Web Process Composition. 10. Mcllraith, S.A., Son, T. C., Zeng,H. (2001):Semantic Web Services,IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2),pp. 46-52. 11. Payne, T., and Lassila, O. Guest Editors Introduction: Semantic Web Services. Intelligent Systems, IEEE (see also IEEE Intelligent Syatems and their Applications) 17, 1 (2002),15 17. 12. Sabou, Marta. Building Web Service Ontologies. The Dutch Graduate School For information and Knowledge Systems

http://Kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marta/papers/thesis.pdf. 13. Shiyong Lu, Ming Dong and Farshad Fotouhi The Semantic Web: opportunities and challenges for next-generation Web applications. 14. Semantic Web Service Challenge: Evaluating Semantic Web Services Mediation, Choreography and Discovery , sponsored by STI International. 15. STAAB, S.,Van Der Aalst, W,Benjamins,V., Sheth,A., Miller,J., Bussler,C., Maedche,A Fensel,D., abd Gannon,D.Web services,been there, done that, Intelligent Systems, IEEE (see also IEEE Intelligent Syatems and their Applications) 17, 1 (2002),15 17. 16.Tonti.G.,Bradshaw,J.M.,Jeffers,R.,Montanari,R.,Suri,N., and Uszok, A. Semantic Web Languages for Policy Representation and Reasoning: A Comparison of KaoS, Rei,and Ponder, vol. 2870. Jan. 2003. 17. Wolfgang Wahlster, Grand Challenges in the Evolution of the Information Society, November 2004. 18. WWW.dcs.bbk.ac.uk//ervices/Architecture.gif. 19. WWW.Wikipedia.com

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