DERI INNSBRUCK Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck DERI – Digital Enterprise Research Institute A Research Plan for DERI Innsbruck: Moving from software to serviceware and from syntax to semantics Jos de Bruijn, Alice Carpentier, Ying Ding, Dieter Fensel, Martin Hepp, Stijn Heymans, Holger Lausen, Birgit Leiter, Christian Mayer, Melanie Plattner, Thomas Strang, DERI Galway Michal Zaremba National University of Ireland Galway Ireland www.ie DERI Innsbruck University of Innsbruck Technikerstrasse 21a Innsbruck Austria www.at DERI Korea 267 Deokil Bldg (Saltlux), Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul 135-848 Korea www.org DERI Stanford Stanford University Serra Mall Stanford USA www.us September 20, 2006 Abstract. A large research body needs a structure to facilitate the potential strength implicitly present in its size. This report is about releasing the full potential that DERI Innsbruck has in this respect. We derive objectives from the overall vision of DERI and align them with researchers and research projects through the means of research cluster.
REASONABLE SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES CLUSTER (RSWS). Jos de Bruijn. SEMANTICS IN BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS CLUSTER (SEBIS). SEMANTIC EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT CLUSTER (SEE).
Adaptive Service Grid. UBIQUITOUS SERVICES CLUSTER (UBISERV). BEYOND RESEARCH: TEACHING, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, AND GENERAL MANGEMENT. CENTRAL MANAGEMENT UNIT.
Knowledge Web Network. Introduction In general, a research institutes based on external funding has three major challenges to meet: • • It needs to provide excellent research results to justify its existence. • It needs to provide excellent education for its researchers to mature its outcomes. It needs to provide excellent performance in research projects to ensure its funding.
Unfortunately, these three dimensions may define conflicting requirements. In consequence it is essential to align them properly. We have chosen a top-down approach where an overall vision and mission is used to align these dimensions properly. In [1], the vision of serviceware as the next natural step beyond hardware and software is introduced: “After four decades of rapid advances in computing, we are embarking on the greatest leap forward in computing that includes revolutionary changes at all levels of computing from the hardware through the middleware and infrastructure to applications and more importantly in intelligence.
This paper outlines a comprehensive framework that ingtegrates two complimentary and revolutionary technical advances, Service- Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Semantic Web, into a single computing architecture, that we call Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architecture (SESA). While SOA is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing, that success depends on resolving two fundamental challenges that SOA does not address, integration, and search or mediation. In a services-oriented world, billions of services must be discovered and selected based on requirements, then orchestrated and adapted or integrated. SOA depends on but does not address either search or integration.
The contribution of this paper is to provide the semantics-based solution to search and integration that will enable the SOA revolution. The paper provides a vision of the future enabled by our framework that places computing and programming at the services layer and places the real goal of computing, problem solving, in the hands of end users.” Based on this SESA vision, a top down approach for organizing the research body in Innsbruck is developed. This implies the following: • • Objectives are derived from the mission to realize the SESA vision. Projects must contribute to one or several of the components of SESA, probably on a 80% rule, i., 20% can be about different or related topics.
This reflects the need for opportunisms since we are cooperating in this process with funding • agencies and external partners that both have their own agendas. Researcher and their research topics follow from sub aspects of some of the objectives. Again, this should hold for at least 80% of these topics. Finally, DERI Innsbruck has clusters as a means to decompose research, the large number of researchers, and project responsibility.
Each cluster is responsible for a number of objectives, a number of researchers, and a number of projects. 6 In the following section, namely Section 2, we provide a general summary on goal, project, and research staff distribution over clusters. The subsequent sections, Section 3 to Section 6, introduce the four research clusters of DERI. Each of these sections is divided into the following subsections, general description, objectives, projects and staff.
Section 7 adds further activities of DERI beyond its focus on research. These activities are related to teaching, business development, and general management. Survey We will survey objectives, clusters, projects and research staff 2. Objectives A objective usually combines a research area, i., a major research challenges in SW(S) and SESA together with an implementation effort related to it.1 A objective typically has a corresponding architectural component, and vice versa.
A tight coupling between objectives and architectural components is desirable. The WSMX platform [2] provides a SESA environment which facilitates prototype development. The major outcome of each of the objectives consists of peer-reviewed conference and journal publications. The prototypes associated with the papers are the major outcome of the architectural components which are associated with the research components.
We distinguish 4 different types of elements of an overall SESA where each element type is composed by some sub functionalities: • The problem-solving layer which consists of (1) Ontologies, (2) Applications (e., e-tourism, e-government) and (3) Developer tools (GUI tools such as ontology/web service description engineering tools; generic developer tools such • as language APIs, parsers/serializers, converters, etc. The broker layer which consists of (4) Discovery, (5) Adaptation (including selection and negotiation), (6) Composition (web service composition techniques such as planning), (7) Choreography, (8) Mediation ((a) Ontology mediation: techniques for combining Ontologies and for overcoming differences between Ontologies; (b) Process mediation: overcoming differences in message ordering, etc.), (9) Grounding, (10) Fault Handling (Transactionality, Compensation, • etc. The base layer that is providing the exchange formalism used by the architecture, i., (12) Formal languages (static ontology and behavioral, i., capability/choreography/orchestration languages, connection between higher- level descriptions, e., WSML), (13) Reasoning (techniques for reasoning over formal descriptions; LP, DL, FOL, behavioral languages, etc.) and (14) Storage • and Communication. Finally, vertical services such as (15) Execution management and (16) Security (authentication/authorization, encryption, trust/certification).
1 Existing working group such as WSML will become a working group of a certain objective. 8 The following image presents the current status of WSMX architecture.1 SESA Architecture Hereby, the overall roadmap is as following: • Currently, DERI Innsbruck focuses on the following essential components to boot-strap the overall approach: (1) Ontologies, (2) Applications, (3) Developer tools, (4) Discovery, (5) Adaptation, (6) Composition, (7) Choreography, (8) Mediation, (9) Grounding, (12) Formal languages, (13) Reasoning, (14) • Storage and Communication, (15) Execution management. There are no concrete plans yet for (10) Fault Handling, (11) Monitoring, and (16) Security. Some of this work may be provided by external DERI cooperation partners.
The following table summarizes these objectives and their leaders. Objectives No Objective Cluster Leader 1 Ontologies SEBIS Martin Hepp In this research topic, we want to advance the state of the art in the creation and the use of ontologies for the automation of business processes. Ontologies in our understanding are community contracts about a representation of a domain of discourse. Representation in here includes (1) formal parts that can be used for machine reasoning, and (2) informal parts like natural language descriptions and multimedia elements that help humans establish, maintain, and renew consensus about the meaning of concepts.
Our research output will 9 be mainly (1) actual ontologies and ontology frameworks for typical application domains, (2) methodologies for the semi-automatic creation of ontologies from informal specifications and standards, (3) process models and infrastructure for collaborative ontology engineering, (4) showcase of ontology usage in typical enterprise scenarios, and (5) economic models for ontology creation and usage. 2 Applications SEE, Michal Mission of the application research topic is to develop a (SEBIS)2 Zaremba common understanding of the various technologies intended to facilitate the use of other services of SESA. This working group will develop (1) use case scenarios that help validate the real-world fitness of SESA components and (2) domain-specific implementations which will be used for testing of SESA services. 3 Developer tools SEE Mick Kerrigan The mission of the developer tools working group is to produce high quality tools related to Semantic Web Services that can be used by users of all competency levels.
To this end we provide a large number of tools that can be used by users with different skill sets. Members of the working group are working on tools for managing WSMO ontologies, web services, goals and mediators, for creating mappings between WSMO ontologies for runtime mediation, for executing WSDL web services and managing WSMO execution environments. 4 Discovery RSWS, Holger Lausen, The goal of the discovery working group is to define a (SEE)2 Mick Kerrigan methodology that allows to model services at a suitable level of granularity. Furthermore we will provide different discovery implementations that are compatible with WSMO, WSML and specifically WSMX.
The discovery group will use the languages developed in the formal languages group and make use of the reasoner support provided by the reasoner group. 5 Adaptation UbiServ Ioan Toma After discovering a set of potentially useful services, the Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) needs to check whether the services can actually fulfill the user's 2 Goals are distributed over clusters. Some goals may require the cooperation of several clusters. In this case there is a lead cluster and an assisting cluster (indicated by brackets).
10 concrete goal and under what conditions. Those that cannot fulfill the goal are removed from the list of discovered services. This step is required as it is not feasible for a service to provide an exhaustive semantic description. Giving the Amazon bookstore service as an example, it is not feasible for Amazon to update the semantic description of their Web service every time a new book is available or the status of an existing book is changed, therefore we must check that Amazon actually currently has a copy of the book requested by the user, and at an acceptable price.
The process of checking whether and under what conditions a service can fulfill a concrete Goal is part of what we call negotiation in SEE, and it also encompasses so-called filtering. 6 Composition Jörg Hoffmann Develop methods to do web service composition (WSC), starting from web service descriptions at various levels of abstraction, specifically, the functional level and process level components of WSMO. Implement such methods as tools in the relevant contexts, in particular WSMX. Find potential applications of WSC technology, model them using WSMO/WSML, and run case studies with the developed tools, ultimately resulting in technology export.
7 Choreography RSWS, James Scicluna The Choreography part of SEE is meant to provide a (SEBIS, process language which should allow for formal SEE)2 specifications of interactions and processes between the service modeling and clients, define reasoning tasks that should be performed using this language, and implement an engine to support the execution of interactions, as well as to support reasoning in this language. 8 Mediation SEE Adrian Mocan Mediation in SESA aims at providing flexible mediation service at both data and process level. The min focus on Data Mediation provides automatic transformation of data used in conversation between various parties based on ontology mappings. Additionally, techniques for ontology mappings optimization and global schema generation are investigated, together with their potential in query rewriting.
As a support for all these mediation scenarios a uniform mapping language is developed, with strong links and support towards automatic mappings generation. The Process Mediator component has the task of solving the communication (behavioral) mismatches that may occur during the communication 11 between a requestor and a provider of a service. As in WSMO, the requestor is a WSMO Goal, while the provider is a Semantic Web Service, the Process Mediator’s task is be to accommodate the mismatches between the goal’s requested Choreography and the SWS’s choreography.