SWSL Committee
Statement of Mission and Objectives

The mission of the SWSI Language Committee is to identify and develop technology that will provide a firm, long-term foundation for the future of Web services on the Internet. This foundation will support the most general approaches to service deployment and use that are currently technically feasible; it will be flexible, extensible, and consistent with the vision of the Semantic Web. We shall do this in a manner that builds on and is maximally consistent with emerging commercial work on Web services. We shall endeavor to provide a long-term perspective to the commercial Web services standards community, and to be a research resource by which relevant technologies of sufficient maturity can be brought to bear on these standards.

The commitee's specific objectives are twofold:

  1. To develop standardized ways of conceptualizing and organizing semantic information about services. This information should be sufficiently general to be able to support nontrivial automated interactions between Web services and intelligent software agents, including interactions that are determined by an autonomous agent and which were not explicitly specified by the agent builder.

  2. To develop a language for the declarative specification of this semantic information. This language will:
    • Enable automation and dynamism in all aspects of Web service provision and use, such as discovery, selection, composition, negotiation and contracting, invocation, monitoring of progress, and recovery from failure;
    • Be extensible and allow for incremental exploitation;
    • Support a style of service use that is closely integrated with information resources on the Semantic Web;
    • Support the construction of powerful tools and methodologies.
This work will be done in close collaboration with the SWSI Architecture Committee, and will support the requirements identified by the Architecture Committee. Insofar as possible, this language specification will be consistent with Semantic Web technology directions emerging internationally, and will be suitable as the starting point for a standardization activity, in a suitable forum such as the World Wide Web Consortium.

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