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Article Excerpt
Web services, the latest new thing in computing, have attracted the massive hype and attention traditionally bestowed on the holder of this title. The high level of interest, although perhaps excessive, is understandable considering what Web services are meant to deliver: nothing less than immediate and automatic integration of disparate IT systems, eliminating the need for drawn-out custom integration efforts involving huge dollops of expensive consulting.
The flood of coverage that Web services has attracted might not be indicative of much, other than the fact that IT journalists haven't had much else to write about lately. Certainly some have started (yet again) to catch on to the fact that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Like the graphical user interface, the Internet, Java, and many other technologies, Web services may have a profound, even revolutionary effect on computing. But like these other technologies, Web services will require much work over years, not months, for this potential to be realized.
Among the most significant questions still facing services are:
* Who is responsible for turning preliminary Web service specifications into real standards?
* How are Web services chained together to form complete applications?
* How are the semantics of Web service interfaces codified in a way that lets an application access an unknown Web service?
The answers to these questions are slowly becoming clearer. The recently formed Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), which brings together Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel, HP and other high-tech leaders, is the most plausible answer yet to the question of who will standardize the hodgepodge of existing Web service-related specs. Recently the World Wide Web Consortium also reaffirmed its commitment to aggressive pursuit of work on Web services standards. And early business process languages like IBM's Web Services Flow Language and BPMI.org's Business Process Modeling Language are increasingly addressing the problem of assembling Web services into applications.
The Semantic Gap
In this article we examine the final question, that of standardizing Web service semantics.
The challenge of representing all but the most trivial Web service semantics in a machine-readable way was well exposed last fall in an article by Clay Shirky. Existing Web service standards, specifically SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, provide little more than a way for applications to invoke a Web service once they already know what its interface looks like. This is all very well for Web services whose purpose is sufficiently transparent (Shirky uses the example of a Web service that translates centimeters into inches), but it's exactly these services...
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