Semantic SOA

Semantic technology is the necessary missing piece in the current stack of SOA technology that makes services discoverable, re-usable and easily integrated. It provides the level of description necessary to get a return on your SOA investment.

The goal of SOA for an enterprise is to have a large pool of services that can be directly reused or dynamically composed in different ways to offer new capabilities. Meaningful, machine-readable service descriptions are foundational to this effort. They enable services to be easily found, reused, and integrated. Semantic technology is used to describe services precisely enough, in a machine-readable way, that they can automatically or manually be found and composed at run time.

Our OWL editing web site, knoodl.com, is used to build OWL based descriptions of all of the services in a SOA and then manages these descriptions in the knoodl repository. These services can be discovered and invoked using the OWL descriptions. These descriptions also enable integration of data returned by the services.

Semantic technology standards can be used to build machine-readable information models called ontologies. Ontologies are used to capture the meaning of a set of concepts and relationships within a formal model. They are very extensible and can be merged with each other enabling them to be easily integrated. These qualities, extensibility and interoperability, are fundamental to all semantic technology components. They are the reason that ontologies are so well suited to be used within a SOA. If an enterprise's services are described using ontologies, other pieces of software will be able to understand exactly what the services do and how they do it enabling them to be aligned, queried for, and composed. The ROI for an enterprise is an unprecedented level of reusability of IT investments and ability to quickly adjust to changes in the real world by building software solutions to business problems from your existing infrastructure and applications. This return on the cost of the investment in SOA is only realized when the SOA is semantically enabled.