How SOA expands the Web Services vision
Esa Törölä, IBM

"To some, SOA is just the latest buzzword, and means the same thing as Web services. To IBM, SOA is a larger vision for building applications from reusable components (called "services") which includes new architectural components and capabilities.

The presentation defines SOA and services, and provides the technical advantage as well as business drivers for the technologies. It compares SOA and Web services, discusses current implementations, and looks at the future of SOA with Business Processes. As the service-oriented infrastructure becomes more mature, we can anticipate a number of management problems - and offer solutions, such as the Web Services Gateway and the Enterprise Service Bus."

"Knowledge management is a challenge for today's business, and it affects the position of enterprises in international competition. Formal and informal knowledge is becoming dynamic and reusable within different business applications and processes. A systematic approach to creating, composing, delivering, maintaining and using documents such as technical manuals is an issue of vital importance in industry. The challenge lies in keeping track of documents, getting right resources and sub-resources for users, as well as in ensuring that information is presented in right contexts. Providing the right pieces of information are critical, for instance in trouble shooting situations or in service intervals of a technical object obeying certain maintenance schedules. Technical manuals are an important part of the technical product itself, whether it is a paper machine, a base station for mobile phones or a rock grinder. Technical manuals and related value-added services are more and more delivered, used and managed through Internet.

Contextual access will be the most relevant means of retrieving information both from the traditional and mobile Web. User, location, device and time determine the context.

The paper will introduce a method for time-sensitive relationship management which provides a systematic way of identifying, modelling and implementing time dependent relationships in application domains of knowledge management such as technical manuals. The method is based on the XML Linking Language (XLink) specification, which has a recommendation status in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and on Allen's relations between two time intervals. Implementing issues and proof-of-concept demonstrations will be presented. Although XLink provides a theoretical and practical framework for the method the time-sensitive multiple linking structure can be adopted by any other XLink-like linking languages on the future Web."

"Luennossa valotetaan XML:n roolia Microsoft arkkitehtuurissa ja pureudutaan tarkemmin BizTalk Serverin ominaisuuksiin ja rooleihin. XML ja Web Services ovat Microsoft arkkitehtuurin kulmakivet ja BizTalk Server on integrointiarkkitehtuurin keskeisin tuote."

"The Semantic Web technologies are maturing from academic and standardization work into real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a Semantic Web based solution for managing employee competencies and other relevant resources--such as documents, customers, projects--about a set of topics. For any company with intellectual property it is crucial to have an infrastructure, where the knowledge can be shared efficiently. Although employee competencies cover only a part of the corporate memory, we believe they are an essential building block in a comprehensive corporate memory management system.

Potentially, Semantic Web technologies enable building flexible systems for corporate memory management. Using machine accessible semantics is the main difference between our competence management solution and other seemingly similar solutions. In traditional competence management systems employees can only state their exact competencies, but because the lack of explicit semantics it is typically hard to infer competencies that the employees may have without knowing it by themselves.

In our approach not only those employees that have competence on the searched topic can be found, but also employees that have competencies on some closely related areas. This means that we can look up persons that are the best possible candidates for the searched competence area. The distance calculation between competence topics is based on formally defined semantics and an object match algorithm. Therefore, adding or changing the competence area structure does not necessarily require corresponding updates to the competencies of the persons. Together these make our approach totally independent of domain in which it is employed or how it is employed."

"Presentation is about the relationship between metadata, taxonomies, and ontologies. It basically goes through all of the concepts and explains what they are, and how they relate to each other."

"Currently the new management technologies for the Web content and Web services are in the focus of Semantic Web research community and most of applications and correspondent ontologies are developing most rapidly within that focus. However for industrial adoption of Semantic Web technology these efforts seem to be not enough. Initial orientation of semantic technology development to the Web digital resources results to omitting from consideration other industrial domain resources such as industrial devices, processes and even humans. In this paper some of SmartResource Tekes project results will be presented, in which the meaning of the term “Semantic Web resource” is expanded and considers industrial objects (devices, machines, systems, etc) and humans (experts, maintenance workers, etc.) as resources and thus as a subject for semantic technology utilisation. Elaboration of a specific adaptation mechanism for these types of resources from their natural environment to a Semantic Web environment has been performed and now is a basis for further research and development. The objective will be making heterogeneous industrial resources (files, documents, services, devices, processes, systems, human experts, etc.) web-accessible, proactive and cooperative in a sense that they will be able to analyze their state independently from other systems or to order such analysis from remote experts or Web-services to be aware of own condition and to plan behavior towards effective and predictive maintenance. Removing the conceptual difference between a human and a web service and introduction of human-resource concept is also one of the challenges for development of an automated resource maintenance system. According to SmartResource vision, industrial resources need an integrated mechanism that allow flexible configuration of resource goals and behavior models. Behavior engine of resource includes support for detection of abnormal resource conditions via continuous monitoring, execution of appropriate behavior patterns striving for achievement of resource’s maintenance goals."

"The last three years have seen the advent of "Semantic Portals" in the public sector in Norway. These are portals that use Topic Maps to structure their content and provide navigation paths for users. Starting with itu.no and luna.itu.no in 2001, over a dozen such portals have been created for organizations ranging from the Research Council to the Consumers Association, from the Conservative Party to the Armed Forces, and from the Department of Culture to the Department of Agriculture.

For the most part these portals have been a resounding success, with both users and content providers, and their number is expected to rise sharply in the next 12 months.

One of the features of such portals is that they contain a large amount of rich semantic data. Also, because they are based on Topic Maps, they have the potential to establish the identity of the subjects with which they are concerned in a very robust manner. This in turn makes them ideal as a springboard for portal connectivity.

This presentation will tell the story of the Semantic Portals of the Norwegian public sector, describing the features, the user reactions, and the underlying technology. It will show how such portals make it much easier for users to find information and much easier for editorial staff to maintain the content. It will also describe experiments currently being undertaken to achieve the goal of "Seamless Knowledge", whereby portals are able to link to one another and share content entirely automatically on the basis of topics that they have in common."