Semantic Execution Environment TC Call for Participation (copy)

[James Bryce Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org>]

The following is re-posted for your convenience from the original posting
at 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200510/msg00004.html

Subject: OASIS TC Call for Participation: OASIS Semantic Execution
Environment Technical Committee
From: James Bryce Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org> 
To: members@lists.oasis-open.org,tc-announce@lists.oasis-open.org 
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:35:37 -0700 

     A new OASIS technical committee is being formed.
The OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee has been
proposed by the members of OASIS listed below.  The proposal (below)
meets the requirements of the OASIS TC Process [1].  The TC name,
statement of purpose, scope, list of deliverables, audience, and language
specified in the proposal will constitute the TC's official charter.
Submissions of technology for consideration by the TC, and the beginning
of technical discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first
meeting.

      This TC will operate under our 2005 IPR
Policy.[2]  The eligibility requirements for becoming a participant
in the TC at the first meeting (see details below) are that:
      (a) you must be an employee of an OASIS
member organization or an individual member of OASIS;
      (b) the OASIS member must sign the OASIS
membership agreement (see [3]);
      (c) you must notify the TC chair of your
intent to participate at least 15 days prior to the first meeting, which
members may do by using the "Join this TC" button on the TC's
public page at [4]; and
      (d) you must attend the first meeting of
the TC, at the time and date fixed below.
      Of course, it also will be possible to
join the TC at a later time.

      Standards always are improved by broad
participation.  Non-OASIS members who wish to participate may
contact us about joining OASIS [3].  Our rules and structure are
designed to promote inclusiveness. We look forward to assisting parties
interested in joining the community of implementers, technologists,
academics and end-users working on OASIS standardization projects. 
All also are welcome to take advantage of the public resources maintained
for each TC: a mail list archive, document repository and public comments
facility, which will be available via the TC's public home page at
[4].  Archives of the TC's mail list and public comment lists, as
with all OASIS TCs, will be visible at [5].

      Further information generally related to
the topic area addressed by this TC may be found on the Cover Pages
at  "Semantic Web: Projects, Initiatives,
Specifications":
http://xml.coverpages.org/semanticWeb.html

      Please feel free to forward this
announcement to any other appropriate lists.  OASIS is an open
standards organization; we encourage your feedback. JBC

~ James Bryce Clark
~ Director, Standards Development, OASIS
~ jamie.clark@oasis-open.org

[1]
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php
[2]
http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php
[3] See
http://www.oasis-open.org/join/
[4]
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=semantic-ex
[5]
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/

====
OASIS SEMANTIC EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT TC

a. Name of the TC 

OASIS Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) Technical Committee

b. Statement of purpose

The technology of Semantic Web services (SWSs) envisions easy access to
various systems and facilitates the consumption of the functionality
exposed by these systems on the Web. Seamless integration, ad-hoc
cooperation between various business parties or dynamic collaborations on
the Web, can be achieved only if tools for handling semantically enhanced
services are provided.

The OASIS SEE TC aims to continue work initiated by the WSMX project and
working group visible at
http://www.wsmx.org
and several other projects in Europe such as DIP (http://dip.semanticweb.org/), ASG (http://asg-platform.org/) and other projects in the area of Semantic Web Services which will start in the coming months. The aim of the SEE TC is to provide guidelines, justifications and implementation directions for an execution environment for Semantic Web services. The resulting architecture will incorporate the application of semantics to service-oriented systems and will provide intelligent mechanisms for consuming Semantic Web services.

Service-oriented architectures anticipate a large number of ambient heterogeneous computational services that may be utilized in various combinations.  However, a typical composition of services to meet a business goal often is an attempt to coordinate disparate resources from multiple sources – services that may not know, or fully understand, each other in advance.  When planning to invoke multiple services, it is not always readily apparent whether the methods and outputs of one service meet the requirements of another.  So some interpretation, mediation or common understanding is essential for any significant deployment.  The SEE TC will define methods for using semantic technologies to solve these coordination and automation issues.

The TC also will define the functional components of such an SWS system and the semantics descriptions of these components' interfaces.  The TC will also define a formal description of execution semantics of such a system.  In addition, the TC will define a generic and open framework, using metadata, to allow for new components to be plugged into the system and made available to the execution engine dynamically. Further, after providing the basic methods described above, or in parallel if appropriate, the SEE TC will seek to develop specifications addressing specific problem sets covering the spectrum from a general purpose environment to a specific business-domain-focused applications addressing financial, telecommunication, military and e-Government applications of Semantic Web Services technologies.

In the course of existing research, it has become clear that Semantic Web services and Grid Computing are closely related research activities with many shared objectives. Both address distributed computing systems from different perspectives and we believe that they should be investigated in parallel as complementary technologies enabling the next era of internet applications. In our vision, the usage of arbitrary resources (physical or logical) for building complex business applications should be simplified, so that their discovery, deployment, composition, provisioning and management, can be performed by the means of semantic-enhanced services. To reach this goal, on the one hand, current Grid technologies need to be extended to support semantically enriched resource descriptions and services, e.g. to simplify their discovery and composition. On the other hand, Semantic Web services technology has to be extended to support resource management, including dynamic provisioning of s
ervices and resources, execution management, and support of security-related issues concerning virtual organization management. This TC aims to combine Grid Computing with Semantic Web Services technologies and to take advantage of their different perspectives to provide architecture of the infrastructure for machine-to-machine enabled communication and cooperation.

The SEE TC's efforts will foster compatibility across specifications developed for Semantic Web Services, and where possible re-use existing standards and methods that already have been carried in areas of Semantic Web and Web Services. This TC will engage with industry, academic and research communities to facilitate understanding, awareness and possible collaborations regarding emerging semantic technologies and research applicable to semantically-aware Web Services.

c. Scope.

Initial requirements have indicated that Semantic Web services systems 
should enable automatic or semi-automatic discovery, negotiation, 
selection, composition, mediation, invocation and interoperation of 
multiple services.  The SEE TC will assess the subsequent and related works 
and implementation experience of existing efforts in a variety of sectors 
(financial, telecommunication, e-health and e-governament) to define and 
implement these functions related with Semantic Web Services. Based on 
those experiences, the detailed analysis of requirements for Semantic Web 
services Architecture will be provided.

The SEE TC will provide a testbed for the Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO), which is anticipated as a contribution for use by the TC on a non-exclusive basis, and will seek to demonstrate the viability of using WSMO concepts, relationships and definitions as a means to achieve successful dynamic interoperation of multiple ambient services, whether or not they share a common design or source.

The TC anticipates contribution of the draft WSMX specifications and WSMO ontology on a non-exclusive basis. Other contributions will be accepted for consideration without any prejudice or restrictions, and evaluated on their technical merit, as long as the contributions conform to this charter.

Following a top-down, component based development approach, the TC will provide a whole framework capable of carrying out the dynamic discovery, mediation, selection, invocation and inter-operation of Web Services and any other functionality which will be revealed during the requirements analysis phase. While the focus of this group will remain on a high level semantic description of components interfaces, the TC will seek tight cooperation with any group working on semantics-enabled functional components that fulfill the requirements of such system.

The SEE TC will not implement actual software products or solutions based on the specifications developed along the course of work of this group.

d.  Deliverables

OASIS SEE TC will develop two Technical Specifications described below, and also may elect to issue Technical Reports and White Papers:

    * Semantic Web Services Architecture and Information Model -- final version available in December 2007 (the TC may issue intermediate versions as frequently as every 6 months)
    * Services Specification - Execution Semantics for Semantics-Enabled systems -- final version available in December 2007 (intermediate versions may be available as frequently as every 6 months)
    * Technical Reports will be drafted as appropriate
    * White Papers as appropriate

e. IPR Mode

SEE TC will operate under "RF on Limited Terms" mode.

f.  Anticipated audience

The anticipated audience for this work includes all OASIS Web Service and ebXML TCs, non-OASIS Web Service standards groups, Semantic Web Services research and interest groups, SOA architects and programmers, vendors and users. The work should be of interest to anyone involved with Semantic Web Services and more generally also in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

g.  Language.

English.  The TC may elect to form subcommittees that produce localized documentation of the TC's work in additional languages.

----

The following is informational only for the purposes of starting the TC, and will not be part of the TC's charter.

a. Similar and related work and liaisons

All Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture groups are the primary target of this work. It is anticipated that liaisons may be needed for many SOA-related Technical Committees such as the following:

OASIS SOA Reference Model TC
OASIS ebSOA TC
OASIS Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) TC
OASIS ebXML Registry TC
OASIS UDDI TC
OASIS FWSI TC
OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints TC
OASIS ebXML BP TC
W3C WS Description Working Group
W3C WS Choreography Working Group
W3C Resource Description Framework
Web Services Modelling Ontology Working Group
Web Services Modelling Language Working Group
OASIS WSBPEL TC
SWSI
Meteor-S
OWL-S

b.  Anticipated contributions

Overview and Scope of WSMX, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.0/v0.2/
WSMX Conceptual Model, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.1/v0.2/
WSMX Mediation, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.3/v0.1/
WSMX Architecture,  http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.4/v0.1/
Processes Mediation in WSMX, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.7/v0.1/
WSMO, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d2/v1.2/

c. First meeting

Date: 11 November 2005
Time: 1:00 pm CET
Telephone conference:  immediately after the International Semantic Web Conference 2005 in Galway, Ireland (http://iswc2005.semanticweb.org/)
Meeting Sponsor: DERI

d. On-going meeting schedule (subject to TC approval)

Meeting schedule will be biweekly conference calls as well as quarterly Face to Face meetings pending approval and adoption by the TC.
Sponsor: DERI

e. Proposers.

Jürgen Angele, angele@ontoprise.de, Ontorprise, Germany
Boualem Benatallah boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au, University of New South Wales, Australia
Michael Brodie, michael.brodie@verizon.com, Verizon, USA
Mark Burstein, burstein@bbn.com, BBN Technologies, USA
Christoph Bussler chris.bussler@deri.org, DERI, Ireland
Dario Cerizza, cerizza@cefriel.it, Cefriel, Italy
Marin Dimitrov, marin.dimitrov@ontotext.com, Ontotext, Bulgaria
John Domingue, j.b.domingue@open.ac.uk, Open University, UK
Asuman Dogac, asuman@srdc.metu.edu.tr, Software Research & Development Center, Turkey
Arik Elberse, elberse@nortel.com, Nortel, Ireland
Jerome.Euzenat, Jerome.Euzenat@inrialpes.fr, Inria, France
Dieter Fensel, dieter.fensel@deri.org, DERI, Austria
Masahiro Hori, horim@res.kutc.kansai-u.ac.jp, Kansai University, Japan
Mike Huhns, huhns@engr.sc.edu, University of South Carolina, USA
Hong-Gee Kim, hgkim@snu.ac.kr, DERI, Korea
Rafael Garcia Leiva, rafael.garcia@andago.com, Andago, Spain
Sara Carro Martínez, scm@tid.es, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
Dugki Min, dkmin@konkuk.ac.kr, Konkuk University, Korea
Colm O hEocha, Colm.O'hEocha@ie.fid-intl.com, Fidelity, Ireland
Massimo Paolucci, paolucci@docomolab-euro.com
Amit Sheth, amit@cs.uga.edu, LSDIS, USA
Emanuele Della Valle emanuele.dellavalle@cefriel,Cefriel, Italy
Kunal Verma, verma@cs.uga.edu, LSDIS, USA
Alexander Wahler, wahler@niwa.at, Niwa, Austria
Michal Zaremba, michal.zaremba@deri.org, DERI, Ireland

f.  TC Convener

Michal Zaremba, michal.zaremba@deri.org, DERI, Ireland

g. Proposed TC chair or co-chairs

Dieter Fensel, dieter.fensel@deri.org, DERI, Austria
Michal Zaremba, michal.zaremba@deri.org, DERI, Ireland

END