Web Services to Semantic Web processes:
Investigating Synergy between Practice and Research

Amit Sheth, LSDIS Lab, the University of Georgia; Semangix Inc.

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services have received considerable interest from both academia and industry. However, areas of focus for both seem to be quite different. Industry has focused on intra-Enterprise applications, on tools and usability issues and on developing standards and techniques for privacy, agreements and security. Academia seems to have been looking beyond individual services to Web processes to address inter-Enterprise and global-scale requirements, focusing on issues such as discovery, composition, use of semantics and support for dynamic integration. In this talk, we seek to investigate the reasons for different perspectives and potential synergies. For example, while industry seems to be focusing on static composition of web services, is there a role for more dynamic strategies that could be appropriate for agile companies and those with dynamic supply chain (e.g., Amazon and Dell)? Why does industry seem to have little interest in automated planning and patterns (i.e., control flow) for dynamic composition that has received considerable research interest? Why the real role of semantics may not be in discovery (at least in the next few years) but in enabling data mapping and integration, or in developing more formal and verifiable models for policy, agreement and QoS? In the process of investigating above questions, we will also discuss how the METEOR-S project at the LSDIS lab seeks to explore the issues at the intersection of industry needs and challenging research issues.

About the speaker:

Prof. Amit Sheth is an Educator, Entrepreneur, and Researcher.  He is a Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) Lab, at the University of Georgia.  He is also the CTO and co-founder of Semagix, Inc. His research in semantic interoperability and information integration, workflow management and semantic web processes, and in the Semantic Web has led to three major commercial products, two companies, and many real-world applications. He is the EIC of International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, serves on five journal editorial boards, and is an advisory committee member of W3C. He has served on over 100 program committees, organized (as chair/co-chair) fifteen conferences/workshops, and given over 150 invited talks/colloquia including 19 keynotes.