Semantic Web Services — The Ugly Stepchildren
If Semantic Web research is about annotating data on the Web, then Semantic Web Service research is about annotating functions on the Web. Semantic Web Service research started about the same time as the Semantic Web research. But it did not receive the same publicity as the parent Semantic Web development.
As Martin Hepp puts it, “[Semantic Web Services] are widely regarded as the ‘ugly stepchildren’ [of the Semantic Web]“. In his recently article, Hepp discussed why it’s wrong to think Semantic Web Services are less important than those systems that solely focused on annotating static web content and information that stored in databases.
Hepp writes,
No Semantic Web without Services. Exposing functionality in the form of Web services is generally more attractive for market participants than publishing all relevant facts directly on the Web. To turn the Web into the Semantic Web will require a move beyond the data-centric approach of annotating information on Web pages to annotating exposed functionality in Semantic Web services technologies. This will necessitate a substantial shift as the Semantic Web services research community is currently much smaller than the general Semantic Web research community.
While I think Semantic Web Services are important and research topic, but I disagree with Hepp on that the Semantic Web can’t exist without Semantic Web Services.
First, it’s unclear whether Semantic Web Services are the killer-apps of the Semantic Web. As of today, there is no real Semantic Web killer-apps in the market. While researchers and early adopters have some understanding of this technology’s potential, but much of this understanding is based on speculations rather than hard evidences. To say Semantic Web Services are core to the success of the Semantic Web is just another speculation.
Second, in the current Web, lacking semantic data is more a problem than lacking semantic services. Typical web users today face the problem of not being able to find relevant information in a unstructured web information space (photos, news, blogs, videos, audios etc.). To these users, the need to solve data annotation and knowledge integration problems is more urgent than the need to solve service annotations and service composition problems.
Third, technology evolution is usually driven by society demands and not by what inventors had imagined. When the current Web was first invented, no one had predicated that it can also be used to facilitate e-business transactions and create new business models for the music industry. I think the Semantic Web will share the same fate as the current Web. It probably will be used to solve problems that most people haven’t paid attentions to.
In summary, I think Semantic Web Services are important components of the Semantic Web, but not necessary they are the essential components that would determine the success of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web research is rapidly progressing. Its real business value is still waiting to be demonstrated.
References:
- Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services — Father and Son or Indivisible Twins?, Martin Heep, IEEE Internet Computing, March-April 2006.
[...] I just discovered an interesting article on the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog about Semantic Web Services and their importance to the movement of the Semantic Web. The author states, that the Semantic Web could exist without the notion of Semantic Web Services. [...]
Pingback by gisblog.net » Blog Archive » The importance of Semantic Web Services — March 22, 2006 @ 5:42 pm
Hi - thanks for your interest in my work. The statements of the paper are a bit more than another speculation, since we can show with a quantitative analysis [1] that at least in e-Tourism, the limitation of the Web is not just “the needle-in-the-haystack”-problem, i.e. “everything is there, we just do not find it”. We could show in this paper that most of the data that is needed for the Semantic Web vision to become a reality is not exposed as data but just in the form of functionality. Yes, we speculate about the reasons for this, and yes, the situation might be different in areas in which economic forces and incentives play a lesser role. However, since almost any Semantic Web paper refers, in one way or another, to “E-Commerce” when it comes to justifying the relevance of the research topic, I still think that our findings justify much more attentention for the SWS community.
I hope this explains our point a bit better.
Best
Martin
http://www.heppnetz.de
[1] Martin Hepp, Katharina Siorpaes, Daniel Bachlechner: Towards the Semantic Web in E-Tourism: Can Annotation Do the Trick?
Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Information System (ECIS 2006), June 12-14, 2006, Gothenburg, Sweden (forthcoming). Preprint available on http://www.heppnetz.de
Comment by Martin Hepp — May 1, 2006 @ 4:35 pm