Elements of a "Semantic UDDI" Solution

["John Colgrave" <colgrave@hursley.ibm.com>]

Following on from yesterday's interesting discussion, I think we need to
consider the following elements when thinking about extending UDDI with
semantic matching capabilities:
1) Service providers need to be able to use one or more ontologies, written
in one or more languages, to describe the capabilities of their services.
2) These ontologies need to be hosted somewhere and be managed, discovered
and used to validate uses of them as appropriate.
3) Service providers need to be able to provide descriptions of the
capabilities of their service in one or more languages, using these
ontologies, and associate them with the "traditional" UDDI model of the
service.
4) Service requesters need to be able to use one or more ontologies, written
in one or more languages, to describe their requirements.
5) Service requesters need to communicate their requirements as part of a
(UDDI) query.
6) Service requesters need to be able to control aspects of the search, for
example the strictness of matching to be used, whether subsumption is
allowed etc.
7) Some kind of matching engine needs to match the requester's requirements
with service capabilities, in conjunction with standard UDDI criteria
(otherwise there is no point in doing this in the context of UDDI).

Most of the approaches I am familiar with have a very loose coupling with
UDDI and work with a standard UDDI registry, providing all the integration
either in the client or in a separate service that provides a façade to
UDDI, using a non-standard interface.

I understood Max to say that he thought that the ontologies should be
outside UDDI but the capability descriptions should be inside UDDI, in this
rdfBag, and the only validation to be performed would be that the contents
of the rdfBag matched some RDF schema.  On the requester side, I am not sure
how the requirements are represented or the details relating to the query,
although findQualifiers are the obvious approach to the latter part.

I think one of the major choices we need to make is to what extent we want
to bake something into the UDDI core as opposed to allowing for external
(pluggable) components.

John Colgrave
IBM