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Company data, ranging from basic company information such as company name(s) and incorporation date to complex balance sheets and personal data about directors and shareholders, are the foundation that many data value chains depend upon in various sectors (e.g., business information, marketing and sales, etc.). Company data becomes a valuable asset when data is collected and integrated from a variety of sources, both authoritative (e.g., national business registers) and non-authoritative (e.g., company websites). Company data integration is however a difficult task primarily due to the heterogeneity and complexity of company data, and the lack of generally agreed upon semantic descriptions of the concepts in this domain. In this article, we introduce the euBusinessGraph ontology as a lightweight mechanism for harmonising company data for the purpose of aggregating, linking, provisioning and analysing basic company data. The article provides an overview of the related work, ontology scope, ontology development process, explanations of core concepts and relationships, and the implementation of the ontology. Furthermore, we present scenarios where the ontology was used, among others, for publishing company data (business knowledge graph) and for comparing data from various company data providers. The euBusinessGraph ontology serves as an asset not only for enabling various tasks related to company data but also on which various extensions can be built upon. The work in this article was partly funded by the EC H2020 projects euBusinessGraph (grant 732003), EW-Shopp (grant 732590), TheyBuyForYou (780247), CIMA (grant BG16RFOP002-1.005-0168-C01)

Earthquakes, landslides, and other natural hazard events have severe negative socio-economic impacts. Among other consequences, those events can cause damage to infrastructure networks such as roads and railways. Novel methodologies and tools are needed to analyse the potential impacts of extreme natural hazard events and aid in the decision-making process regarding the protection of existing critical road and rail infrastructure as well as the development of new infrastructure. Enabling uniform, integrated, and reliable access to data on historical failures of critical transport infrastructure can help infrastructure managers and scientist from various related areas to better understand, prevent, and mitigate the impact of natural hazards on critical infrastructures. This paper describes the construction of the InfraRisk ontology for representing relevant information about natural hazard events and their impact on infrastructure components. Furthermore, we present a software prototype that visualizes data published using the proposed ontology.

Part 3: Environmental Information Systems and Services – Infrastructures and Platforms; International audience; The ENVISION Portal is a Web-enabled infrastructure for the discovery, annotation, and composition of environmental services. It is a tool to create Web sites dedicated to particular domain-specific scenarios such as oil spill drift modeling or landslide risk assessment. The underlying architecture based on pluggable user interface components is briefly discussed, followed by a presentation of the components resulting from the first iteration of the implementation. A walkthrough explains how to create a scenario website and populate it with the user interface components required for one specific scenario. The paper concludes with a discussion of open challenges identified during the implementation.

The potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective marketplaces and eCommerce solutions has driven recent research efforts towards so-called Semantic Web Services that are enriching Web services with machine-processable semantics. To this end, the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) provides the conceptual underpinning and a formal language for semantically describing all relevant aspects of Web services in order to facilitate the automatization of discovering, combining and invoking electronic services over the Web. In this paper we describe the overall structure of WSMO by its four main elements: ontologies, which provide the terminology used by other WSMO elements, Web services, which provide access to services that, in turn, provide some value in some domain, goals that represent user desires, and mediators, which deal with interoperability problems between different WSMO elements. Along with introducing the main elements of WSMO, we provide a logical language for defining formal statements in WSMO together with some motivating examples from practical use cases which shall demonstrate the benefits of Semantic Web Services.

Many companies are now surfing the cloud in order to generate renewed interested in their companies. Buzzwords have increasingly gained importance in marketing of on-line services. In this poster researchers in education and implementers in industry will work together to outline the major issues that are prevalent in the implementation of cloud systems. The poster will be developed from a workshop investigating best practices as defined by both academia and industry.

Location of services plays an important role in the process of service selection. Geotagging emerged as a technique for attaching location information to Web elements, including Web services. In this context, this paper proposes a Web service selection framework based on geotagging. First, we introduce tagging and geotagging as an operation that emphasizes processes and the dynamic aspects of the environment. Then, we propose a conceptual model that defines a set of relations between tags. Furthermore, we develop a service selection technique based on this model and give an example of service selection. An overview of a system that implements geotagging-based service selection is presented at the end.

Several approaches to semantic Web services, including OWLS, SWSF, and WSMO, have been proposed in the literature with the aim to enable automation of various tasks related to Web services, including discovery, contracting, enactment, monitoring, and mediation. The ability to specify processes and to reason about them is central to these initiatives. In this paper we analyze the WSMO choreography model, which is based on Abstract State Machines (ASMs), and propose a methodology for generating WSMO choreography from visual specifications. We point out the limitations of the current WSMO model and propose a faithful extension that is based on Concurrent Transaction Logic (CTR). The advantage of a CTR-based model is that it uniformly captures a number of aspects that previously required separate mechanisms orwere not captured at all. These include process specification, contracting for services, service enactment, and reasoning.

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing, especially in the area of e-business and e-work processing, that has evolved from object-oriented and component-based computing to enable the building of scalable and agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries; services will count for customers and not the specific software or hardware component that is used to implement the services. In this context, services become the next level of abstraction in the process of creating systems that would enable automation of e-businesses and e-works.

The emerging paradigm of service-oriented computing requires novel techniques for various service-related tasks. Along with automated support for service discovery, selection, negotiation, and composition, support for automated service contracting and enactment is crucial for any large scale service environment, where large numbers of clients and service providers interact. Many problems in this area involve reasoning, and a number of logic-based methods to handle these problems have emerged in the field of Semantic Web Services. In this paper, we build upon our previous work where we used Concurrent Transaction Logic (CTR) to model and reason about service contracts. We significantly extend the modeling power of the previous work by allowing iterative processes in the specification of service contracts, and we extend the proof theory of CTR to enable reasoning about such contracts. With this extension, our logic-based approach is capable of modeling general services represented using languages such as WS-BPEL.

These proceedings contain the papers accepted for the 2nd edition of the workshop ”Advances in Semantics for Web services 2007” (semantics4ws 2007). The workshop was held in Brisbane, Australia, on September 24, 2007, in conjunction with the Fifth International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2007).

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) suggest that IT systems should be developed from coarse-grained, loosely coupled, business-aligned components, so called services. One way towards loose coupling is to refrain from hard-coding policies in the system and to represent them explicitly. This approach is increasingly implemented in Web service deployments (the main realization of SOAs). Semantic Web services (SWS) add semantics to Web services, to automate the various tasks common in service-oriented systems. While some work has been done on semantic approaches to policy expression and evaluation, SWS research so far has mostly ignored policies, therefore in this paper we analyze where Web service policies fit within the context of SWS.

Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges, such as discovery, ranking and selection of services. Robust and automatic solutions for these challenges requires various services and user requests aspects, including functional and non-functional, to be semantically described. Non-functional properties especially are highly relevant especially during ranking and selection tasks. This paper introduces a semantically- enables approach for describing non-functional properties of services and further discusses how such descriptions can be used during in one service related task, namely ranking.

Organizations expect Web services to make their information systems more agile, so they can better adapt to changes in business requirements. Hence, this technology focuses on interoperability and flexibility giving developers the ability to customize, reuse and enhance Web service functionalities as well as non-functional extensions such as security, transactions and reliable messaging. This paper describes the core mechanisms necessary to build Web Services extensions, regardless of the underlying platform. This contribution is based on the results of a comprehensive evaluation of existing implementations.

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are quickly becoming the de-facto solutions for providing end-to-end enterprise connectivity. However realizing the vision of SOA requires, among others, solutions for one fundamental challenge, namely service ranking. Once a set of services that fulfill the requested functionality is discovered, an ordered list of services needs to be created according to users preferences. These preferences are often expressed in terms of multiple non-functional properties (NFPs). This paper proposes a multi-criteria ranking approach for semantic web services. We start by briefly introducing ontological models for NFPs. These models are used to specify rules which describe NFP aspects of services and goals/requests. The ranking mechanism evaluates these NFPs rules using a reasoning engine and produces a ranked list of services according to users preferences.

About the book: The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business."Semantic Web Technologies" provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management ("Semantic Information Access") and in the next generation of Web services." Semantic Web Technologies": provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies; explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability; describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation; discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation; and illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find "Semantic Web Technologies" an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.

Semantic Web Services frameworks like OWL-S and WSMO combine semantic descriptions of Web service capabilities, inputs, outputs and behavior with the syntactic interface descriptions in WSDL and XML Schema. The glue between the semantic and syntactic description layers is called grounding. In this paper we identify the uses for grounding and we present the existing grounding approaches and propose new ones, discussing their respective advantages and drawbacks. Finally, we compare OWLS and WSMO with regards to their support of the presented grounding approaches and we recommend which approaches should be considered for future work.

This workshop addresses research around methods, concepts, models, languages and technologies for choreography and orchestration of Web services with special focus on Web service technologies and solutions for business process management.

In this paper, we present a distributed Web service discovery architecture that is designed to be reliable, flexible and scalable. The architecture is based on the concept of distributed shared space and intelligent search among a subset of spaces. It allows the publishing of Web service descriptions as well as to submit requests to discover the Web service of user’s interests. The Web service capabilities and the user requests (goal) are described using a Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model. The architecture supports integration of applications running on different resource specific devices. An application scenario is presented to illustrate the functionality of the proposed architecture.

This paper presents, in a nutshell, a unifying framework for conceptually modeling, formally representing, and executing Semantic Web services We first introduce a conceptual model for representing Semantic Web services and its design principles, then we present a language based on different logical formalisms used to express Semantic Web services that are compliant with our conceptual model Finally, a high level overview of an execution environment, and its relations to the conceptual model and the language introduced in this paper, are presented.

Semantic Web Fred, SWF for short, is a context-independent, goal-driven system for automated execution of tasks that are delegated to electronic representatives along with dynamic service usage. A task is assigned to an agent for automated resolution, represented as a Goal. This is used to determine potential partners for collaborative task resolution, and for discovery of suitable goal-resolving services that can be internal implementations as well as external Semantic Web Services. The SWF technology integrates agent technology, ontologies, and Semantic Web Service technologies - the technological building blocks identified for the Semantic Web - into a coherent system. This paper describes the architecture of SWF, explains the mechanisms for establishing automated and cooperative goal resolution, and the alignment of SWF with the Web Service Modeling Ontology WSMO, a well-structured overall framework for Semantic Web Services. We also outline the contribution of SWF to the development of Semantic Web technologies.

This paper presents a dynamic and scalable mechanism for discovery of semantically enriched descriptions of Web services. By employing Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) as the underlying framework for describing both user requests and Web services, and combining it with the usage of Peer-to-Peer technology in this context, a scalable, distributed, dynamic and flexible discovery mechanism is obtained. A use case scenario is presented for supporting the viability of such a mechanism.

Web services and Grid computing are technologies with a great impact these days. Both technologies are taking a syntactical based approach to describe services, and therefore, limited support is provided for service related tasks like: discovery, composition, etc. Semantic Web services try to overcome the limitations of syntactical based approaches by adding semantics to services descriptions. One of the most salient initiatives in Semantic Web services area is the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). WSMO provides a conceptual model and languages to express semantic descriptions of services. We believe that WSMO, the conceptual model, and WSML, the associated family of languages, with some extensions and/or restrictions could be the solution for semantically describe services in Grid environment.

Web Services have added a new level of functionality on top of current Web, enabling the use and combination of distributed functional components within and across company boundaries. The addition of semantic information to describe Web Services, in order to enable the automatic location, combination and use of distributed functionalities, is nowadays one of the most relevant research topics due to its potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective Enterprise Application Integration and eCommerce. In this context, two major initiatives aim to realize Semantic Web Services by providing appropriate description means that enable the effective exploitation of semantic annotations, namely: WSMO and OWL-S. In this paper, we conduct a conceptual comparison that identifies the overlaps and differences of both initiatives in order to evaluate their applicability in a real setting and their potential to become widely accepted standards.

RuleML 2014 held in conjunction with ECAI 2014, the 21st biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence; International audience; In this paper, we motivate and develop the linguistic characteristics of requirement compounds which are major types of business rules. The discourse structures that further refine or elaborate requirements are also analyzed. An implementation is then presented. It is carried out in Dislog on the platform. Dislog allows high level specifications in logic that allow fast and easy prototyping at a high level of linguistic adequacy. Elements of an indicative evaluation are provided.