Semantic Web
I’m new to the discussion around semantic web that Nacer and Aissani (2014) bring into focus in their review [1], but from this first introduction it seems like I’m on the same wavelength. In software engineering, we talked a bunch about software standards for the project life cycle, for testing, for documentation, and for nearly everything else, so it totally grooves with my mango that there should be emerging standards for the web itself. The semantic web is a push toward standardizing information and services on the web so that humans and the software that we right can work efficiently and almost intuitively with it to do greater and greater things, and the current paper is an attempt to review efforts to make services more interoperable.
The first cornerstone of interoperability is standards development. The authors point to XML standards like WSDL and SOAP that attempt to standardize web services and builds the case for improving the role of XML in the semantic web using annotations and annotation tools to give XML semantic meaning as well as discovery tools to help developers compose XML-based web services. The second important component reviewed here is web services composition strategy, and the authors dive into performance comparisons between middleware, that exist to discover and integrate web services for complex business applications, and semantic web services. The authors hypothesized that the various middleware they tested are sort of pigeon-holed for their particular programming frameworks but that semantic web services are more flexible. Their experimental data showed that the Java-based middleware was faster than web services, but the authors reason that semantic web services sacrifice some performance for easy interoperability.
References [1] H. Nacer and D. Aissani, “Semantic web services: Standards, applications, challenges and solutions,” J. Netw. Comput. Appl., vol. 44, pp. 134–151, 2014.