Role of semantics in Autonomic and Adaptive Web Services & Processes

The emergence of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) has created a new paradigm of loosely coupled distributed systems. In the METEOR-S project, we have studied the comprehensive role of semantics in all stages of the life cycle of service and process-- including annotation, publication, discovery, interoperability/data mediation, and composition. In 2002-2003, we had offered a broad framework of semantics consisting of four types:1) Data semantics, 2) Functional semantics, 3) Non-Functional semantics and 4) Execution semantics. This talk describes the need for the four types of semantics, its standards-based support through WSDL-S/SAWSDL, and the need for such semantic representation to dynamic and adaptive SOA. We also briefly review the proposal for Adaptive Web Processes introduced earlier in a ICSOC 2005 vision talk.