Service Knowledge Spaces for Semantic Collaboration in Web-based Systems

Semantic Web technologies have been applied to enable collaboration in open distributed systems, where interoperability issues raise due to the absence of a global view of the shared resources. Adoption of service-oriented technologies has improved interoperability at the application level by exporting systems functionalities as Web services. In fact, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitutes an appropriate platform-independent approach to implement collaboration activities by means of automatic service discovery and composition. Recently, service discovery has been applied to collaborative environments such as the P2P one, where independent partners need cooperate through resource sharing without a stable network configuration and adopting different semantic models. Model-based techniques relying on Semantic Web need be defined to generate semantic service descriptions, allowing collaborative partners to export their functionalities in a semantic way. Semantic-based service matchmaking techniques are in charge of effectively and efficiently evaluating similarity between service requests and service offers in a huge, dynamic distributed environment. The result is an evolving service knowledge space where collaborative partners that provide similar services are semantically related and constitute synergic service centres in a given domain. Specific modeling requirements related to Semantic Web, service-oriented and P2P technologies must be considered.