Towards Declarative Programming for Web Services

Sheila A. McIlraith

Abstract: Two trends are emerging in the World Wide Web (WWW). The first is the proliferation of Web Services – self-contained, Web-accessible software applications and associated distributed systems architectures. The second is the emergence of the “Semantic Web,” the vision for a next-generation WWW that is computer interpretable. Today’s Web was designed primarily for human use. To enable reliable, large-scale automated interoperation of Web services, their properties and capabilities must be understandable to a computer program. In this talk we briefly overview our ongoing work to develop a declarative language for describing Web services on the Semantic Web, contrasting it with emerging industrial Web service and Semantic Web standards. Our declarative representation of Web services enables automation of a wide variety of tasks including discovery, invocation, interoperation, composition, simulation, verification and monitoring.