Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architectures: A Manifesto and a Paradigm Shift in Computer Science

Abstract

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 integrates two complimentary and revolutionary technical advances, ServiceOriented 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 servicesoriented 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 semanticsbased 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.