Abstract
Web service is a technological solution for software interoperability that supports the seamless integration of diverse applications. In the vision of web service architecture, web services are described by the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), discovered through Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and communicate by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Such a divination has never been fully accomplished yet. Although it was criticized that WSDL only has a syntactic definition of web services, but was not semantic, prior initiatives in semantic web services did not establish a correct methodology to resolve the problem. This paper examines the distinction and relationship between the syntactic and semantic definitions for web services that characterize different purposes in service computation. Further, this paper proposes that the semantics of web service are neutral and independent from the service interface definition, data types and platform. Such a conclusion can be a universal law in software engineering and service computing. Several use cases in the GIScience application are examined in this paper, while the formalization of geospatial services needs to be constructed by the GIScience community towards a comprehensive ontology of the conceptual definitions and relationships for geospatial computation. Advancements in semantic web services research will happen in domain science applications.
Highlights
In English, service means ―work done for others‖ [1], ―contribution to the welfare of others‖ [2] or―work done for somebody‖ [3]
While it was claimed [23] that ―SAWSDL is the first step to infusing semantics into services and SOA‖, it has been demonstrated that the semantics of web service are neutral and independent from the service interface definition specified within the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) document, because the same service semantics can be implemented through a different service interface definition specified in WSDL, while the same interface definition specified in WSDL can have different service semantics
Within domain applications initiated by government agencies, such as web services developed by US EPA [31], NOAA [32], the US Department of Agriculture [33], NASA [34] or by industry, such as Microsoft’s TerraService [35], and those from ESRI [16,17], all of the syntactic descriptions of such services may be not meaningful, or semantic, in the context of the service-oriented architecture for service discovery. Such organizations developed specific web sites to interpret the services in detail to help users or consumers to understand the meaning of services. Such endeavors might have proven that service discovery through the registry or index approaches could not help users to find and understand the right services based on the syntactic definition and description of such services, because their syntactic application programming interface (API) definitions or independent of the syntactic API definitions (IOPEs) had no relationship to the service semantics and were not meaningful to enable service discovery
Summary
In English, service means ―work done for others‖ [1], ―contribution to the welfare of others‖ [2] or. A unified service discovery can be synthesized by targeting the crux of web services as the functional modules of software. It can be explained (1) why the semantics of web services are neutral and independent from the syntactic application programming interface (API) definitions; (2) why the semantics of web services have no relationship with who develops the services; and (3) why not every concept in the semantic definitions has a corresponding syntactic counterpart. A prototype is proposed to explore approaches for the formalization of geospatial services towards a comprehensive ontology of the conceptual definitions and relationships for geospatial services and computational modules that will be useful to GIS software engineering and GIScience education. The proposed rules and the formalized geospatial services can be implemented through a sustained registry system that has a cybernetic mechanism to enforce the syntactic and semantic specifications, while the proposed methodology can be extended to other domain science applications
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