Semantic Web Programming

Semantic Web Programming would allow searching the Semantics within programs rather than just outputs. This would be a step on from open source programming, this would allow open semantics programming. The code could then be visualised and interacted with using all the tools available for visualising semantic web languages. The whole tree/graph structure of a program could be visualised and searched easily.

Programming with XML is already enabled, and progress can now be made in using those languages such as RDF and OWL which are higher in the Semantic Web stack.

Programming with XML is possible using XForms, XQuery, Simkin, Metal, and many Rich Internet Application development environments.

Programming is becoming possible using OWL and OWL-S (OWL for Web Services). Visualisation of OWL structures enables editing by using UML Activity Diagrams, and OWL models programming structures such as if-then-else, and while loops.

Useful Links

Berners-Lee, T., Semantic Web - XML2000 - Architecture - http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/slide10-0.html

Dmitriev, S., Jetbrains - Meta Programming System - http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/ - Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm - Sergey Dmitriev.

From BPEL4WS Process Model to Full OWL-S Ontology - http://www.eswc2006.org/poster-papers/FP13-Aslam.pdf - Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Sören Auer - University of Leipzig Germany, Jun Shen - University of Wollongong Australia - ABSTRACT - BPEL4WS is one of the most utilized business process development languages. It can be used to develop executable business processes as a combination of Web Services interactions in a specific sequence called process flow. But still BPEL4WS lacks sufficient representation of business process semantics required for business processes automation. On the other hand OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to present such kind of semantic information. There exists similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and BPEL4WS that can be used to overcome this lack of semantics in BEPL4WS by mapping the BPEL4WS process model to the OWL-S ontology. The mapped OWL-S service can be dynamically discovered, composed and invoked on the basis of matching semantics. Such a process of mapping syntax based Web Services composition in the form of BPEL process model to Semantic Web Services composition in the form of OWL-S composite service can also enable automation of BPEL processes as OWL-S services by applying AI planning techniques. In this paper we present a mapping strategy and a mapping tool that can be used to map BPEL processes to the OWL-S suite of ontologies.

Introduction to OWL - http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_owl.asp - OWL is a language for processing web information. What You Should Already Know Before you study OWL you should have a basic understanding of XML, XML Namespaces and RDF.

MetaL - http://www.meta-language.net/ - MetaL: An XML based Meta-Programming language.

OWL - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htmOWL

OWL-S API - http://www.mindswap.org/2004/owl-s/api/ - Mindswap - Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab Semantic Web Agents Project - OWL-S API provides a Java API for programmatic access to read, execute and write OWL-S (formerly known as DAML-S) service descriptions. The API supports to read different versions of OWL-S (OWL-S 1.0, OWL-S 0.9, DAML-S 0.7) descriptions. The API provides an ExecutionEngine that can invoke AtomicProcesses that has WSDL or UPnP groundings, and CompositeProcecesses that uses control constructs Sequence, Unordered, and Split. Executing processes that relies on conditionals such as If-Then-else and RepeatUntil is not supported in the default implementation. But this implementation can be extended to handle these constructs if the application that uses the OWL-S descriptions has a custom syntax and evaluation procedure for the conditions.

OWL-S Editor - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/download.shtml - Download.

OWL-S Editor - http://iswc2004.semanticweb.org/demos/02/paper.pdf - Grit Denker and Daniel Elenius and David Martin - SRI International, California, USA, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden - INTRODUCTION - An increasing number of organizations are endorsing Web Services (WS) technology to extend corporate resources to customers and partners and to leverage resources of others. AlthoughWeb Services, based on XML technology, allow interoperability, they do not support efficient and flexible search, allocation, composition, runtime monitoring, or invocation of those Web Services. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) use semantically rich annotations to facilitate these tasks. Richer semantics can provide fuller, more flexible automation of service provision, and use and support the construction of more powerful tools and methodologies.

OWL-S Editor to Semantically Annotate Web-Services - http://staff.um.edu.mt/cabe2/supervising/undergraduate/owlseditFYP/OwlSEdit.html - University of Malta - Department of Computer Science and A.I. - James Scicluna - The current version of the Owl-S Editor can be downloaded from here. We welcome any feedback related to how the tool was used and how effective it was to solve your particular needs. Let us know so that we can improve the tool.

OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services - http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.1/overview/ - Abstract - The Semantic Web should enable greater access not only to content but also to services on the Web. Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties, and should be able to do so with a high degree of automation if desired. Powerful tools should be enabled by service descriptions, across the Web service lifecycle. OWL-S (formerly DAML-S) is an ontology of services that makes these functionalities possible. In this document we describe the overall structure of the ontology and its three main parts: the service profile for advertising and discovering services; the process model, which gives a detailed description of a service's operation; and the grounding, which provides details on how to interoperate with a service, via messages.

OWL Web Ontology Language Guide - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/ - W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004 - The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography. Our insight into the documents and capabilities available are based ..word searches, abetted by clever use of document connectivity and usage patterns. The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources. These descriptions must be in addition to the human-readable versions of that information.

The OWL-S Editor - A Development Tool for Semantic Web Services - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/documents/paper.pdf - Daniel Elenius, Grit Denker, David Martin, Fred Gilham, John Khouri, Shahin Sadaati, and Rukman Senanayake - SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA - Abstract. The power of Web Service (WS) technology lies in the fact that it establishes a common, vendor-neutral platform for integrating distributed computing applications, in intranets as well as the Internet at large. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) promise to provide solutions to the challenges associated with automated discovery, dynamic composition, enactment, and other tasks associated with managing and using service-based systems. One of the barriers to a wider adoption of SWS technology is the lack of tools for creating SWS specifications. OWL-S is one of the major SWS description languages. This paper presents an OWL-S Editor, whose objective is to allow easy, intuitive OWL-S service development and to provide a variety of special-purpose capabilities to facilitate SWS design. The editor is implemented as a plugin to the Protege OWL ontology editor, and is being developed as open-source software.

The OWL-S Editor - A Domain-Specific Extension to Protégé - Elenius, D., 2005. - 8th Intl. Protégé Conference - July 18-21, 2005 - Madrid, Spain.

Programming with XML - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htmProgrammingwithXML

Rich Internet Applications - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htmRichInternetApplications

Simkin - http://www.simkin.co.uk/- A high-level lightweight embeddable scripting language which works with Java or C++ and XML.

VISUAL MODELING OF OWL-S SERVICES - http://members.deri.at/~jamess/pdfs/scicluna-iadis2004.pdf - Msida MSD 06, Malta (Europe) - Mr. James Scicluna, Mr. Charlie Abela, Dr. Matthew Montebello, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta - ABSTRACT - The Semantic Web is slowly gathering interest and becoming a reality. More people are becoming aware of this and are trying to embed Semantic Web technologies into their applications. This involves the use of tools that can handle rapid ontology building and validation in an easy and transparent manner. In the area of Semantic Web Web Services (SWWS) an OWL-S specification defines a set of ontologies through which a semantic description of the service can be created. At times this is not an easy task and could result in an incorrect specification of the description or even lead the fainthearted user to resort to some other type of description language. This paper describes the OWL-S editor tool that provides two methodologies in which such a web services description can be developed without exposing the developer to the underlying OWL-S syntax. These methodologies are based on a mapping from WSDL to OWL-S and on modeling a composite service using standard UML Activity Diagrams.

XForms - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htmXForms

XQuery - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htmXQuery