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Net-centric Service-oriented Enterprises

Bina Ramamurthy

Chapter 1 of The Semantic Web book

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Introduction

Werservices Mashups Service-oriented architectures What next? Web is still a set of static and dynamically generated web pages linked

together. Usually coded in html and meant for human consumption. Web information need to be used not only display purposes but also for

interoperability and integration between systems and applications: XML is a solution that partially addresses this need.

In order to enable machine-machine exchange and automated processing we need to provide information in such a way that machines can understand.

New standards and languages are being investigated and developed to give meaning to web information.

Examples: RDF (Resource Description framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language)

Improve expressiveness of the web, allow automatic and semiautomatic processing of web resources and web pages.

Answer to “What next?”: Semantic Web Services for a given business/industrial domain

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About the textbook

It is one in a series of textbook in this area. Though it approaches service-enabling from semantic web point of

view the industries discussed are quite diverse and very relevant to what we are working on. Financial: data and information management Government: access to municipal services Healthcare: biomedical research and medical records management Education: Course management systems Business: data integration and business process collaboration Enterprise management: knowledge management in steel industry

Technologies such as OWL (Web Ontology Language), RQL, RDQL, SOARQL, and SWRL

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What did we do in CSE507?

Text book: Enterprise SOA: Service-oriented Architecture Best Practices, D. Krafzig, K. Banke and D. Slama, Prentice-Hall Inc., 2007.

WS and SOA

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SOA and WS

A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design model for linking computational resources, data and applications to perform services and deliver results to service consumers.

Web Service (WS) standard provides a platform-independent method for messaging-based interaction of applications.

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Web Services

Web Services is a technology that allows for applications to communicate with each other in a standard format.

A Web Service exposes an interface that can be accessed through messaging.

Deployable unit. A Web service uses protocol to describe an operation and the data

exchange with another web service. Ex: SOAP Platform independent, say, through WSDL. Publishable, discoverable, searchable, queryable Scalability issues: A group of web services collaborating accomplish the

tasks of a large-scale application. Web services can be used to realize the “services” in an SOA. Your task in the first week is to review WS concepts, Try a simple implementation of a WS and get familiarized with WS

framework (XML, SOAP, REST, WSDL etc.), if you have not done so.

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Amazon.com and SOA

“SOA creates order out of chaos @ Amazon” by Rich Seely (June 23, 2006) based on Werner Vogels’ talk “Order in the Chaos: Building the Amazon.com Platform."

1995: Started out with a single web service on a single server. Today amazon has about 150 web services on its homepage alone.

1 million merchant partners; 60 million customers One server of customers and inventory grew into two servers; more

database servers were added as the business expanded 1999: A mistep during this exponential growth period was moving to

mainframe from distributed server. Failed to meet scalability, reliability and performance; it was scratched in 2000.

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Amazon (contd.)

Robustness: Shopping cart is tested for 20000 items by a single customer, for example!

Amazon’s secret sauce is “operating relaibly at scale”. After “the denial of service” debacle in 1999, they decided to use Web services to

insulate the databases from being overwhelmed by direct interaction with online applications.

Each web service is the responsibility of a team of developers: “And they are not just responsible for writing the service and then tossing it over

the wall for testing and eventual entry into production where some poor maintenance geek has to look after it.

The Amazon CTO tells his Web services team members: "You build it. You own it."

That means the team is responsible for its Web service's on-going operation. If a Web service stops working in the middle of the night, team members are called to fix it.”

Web services are kept simple: complexity is the notorious enemy of reliability

No attachment to one technology or standard: what ever customer wants, give it. (Ex: REST and SOAP)

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Topics for Discussion

Creating and using semantic information Ontologies: Cornerstone of Semantic Web

Services and service-oriented enterprises Characteristics of a new world Challenges for service-based applications Importance of semantics for organizations Semantic Service Oriented Architecture

Ontologies + Ontology management system

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Semantic information

Discover, acquire, and create metadata for unstructured, semi-structured, and structured information

Reason, interpret, infer and answer using semantics Represent, organize, integrate resources, content

and knowledge using semantics provision, present, communicate and act using

semantics Provide machine-machine semantic interface,

human-semantics semantic interface

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WS and SOA and Semantics (Web)

WS

SOA

SW

SWS

OWL

W

HTML

XML

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Ontologies in Business

Provide formal support for communication between agents and exchange of knowledge.

In the context of human communications, it aims at reducing and eliminating terminological and conceptual confusion. Unifying framework enabling cooperation amongst

people in reaching better inter-enterprise organization.

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Examples of successful Ontologies Healthcare hierarchical and controlled

vocabulary for human disease representation Food and agriculture organizations of the

United Nations FAO Data management and interchange between

enterprises: Open EDI for business transactions

Scientific Computing Knowledge representation ontologies.

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Characteristics of a new world Information and knowledge are key enablers of

business and economic performance and sustainable development.

Globalization: creation and consumption of knowledge and information are made in the global context. Exploitation of synergies and capacities beyond boundaries Realization of new opportunities Understanding of threats Human and social networks New levels of performance

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Characteristics: Business networking Business and economic activities as well as

competition, require new models of business networking. Advanced documentation of skills and

competencies Newer business models: Example: IF.com’s

banking product Context-based collaboration define new demands

for advanced business networking at global level

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Characteristics: Shared Models A global consensus toward peace, development,

health and prosperity needs to be based on shared conceptual models that addresses issues on global scale. Examples: Global warming Mars exploration Financial and manufacturing sectors Global AIDS initiatives

Global information landscape shared models are required for interoperability, exploitation of collective intelligence.

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Characteristics: Collective intelligence Apply collective intelligent filters or

collaborative filtering in the context of global information world.

These may challenge the traditional models of business performance, marketing and profitability.

Example: Financial domain: once again revisit IF.com

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Characteristics: Open Paradigm Open paradigm relates with several complimentary

movements: Open source software Open content Open access Open knowledge Open research Open culture

Result: amazing capacity to support new business models and several application models.

Example: amazon EC2, cloud computing, map reduce

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Challenges for Semantic Web Services-based Systems: Summary Definition of new modes of human, knowledge and

business networking beyond local boundaries: well defined conceptual models that match information sources and human services. With ontologies and social networks as anchors Process and service-oriented infrastructure

Globalizing information and definition of new contexts for value exploitation: Design of multiple reference levels to the same set of

information and knowledge delivers a new level for dynamic, and personalized systems.

Internationalization

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Challenges…

Delivering and integrating quality to information: Enormous explosion of content while quality is very subjective

concept We need infrastructure that deliver assessment models of

information quality. Integration of isolated information assets: build more meaningful

services. SOA can help in this aspect. Lets discuss how? Support of business value and co-located distributed business

models: crucial aspect is to translate web semantic ontologies to business models. SOA can help bridge this gap. How?

Promotion of a critical shift in human understanding and interacting with digital world: Web needs to respond to human demand for richer modes of meaningful, useful and productive interaction. Combination of semantics and SOA can help here.

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Importance of semantics and services (SOA) to organizations Integration is the top priority for many worldwide

enterprises. Inter, intra and human interface integration. Cross-organization cooperation in small and

medium enterprises (SME). Semantics and service combination can facilitate

discovery of heterogeneous components, data integration and communication.

Semantics SOA is most suitable for business-business interaction and in integration of e-business value chains. Ex: amazon.com market place, yahoo.com

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Ontology Management System (OMS) Supports entire lifecycle of inter-enterprise

ontologies, including creation, storage, search, query, reuse, maintenance, and integration.

An OMS needs to address a wide range of problems: ontology models, ontology base design, query languages, programming interfaces, query processes and optimization, federation of knowledge sources, caching and indexing, transaction support, distributed system support, and security support.

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Overall Challenge

High volume and wealth of data and information generated by the numerous web applications that needs to be analyzed and processed to provide useful and timely knowledge for decision makers. Arcelor Mittal: 330000employees, 60 countries,

flat steel products. How to extract knowledge from the information generated?

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Contributions of the text chapters Important industries (vertical domains) covered:

semantic enterprises, finance, government, healthcare and life sciences, education, business and customer management, enterprise management and security.

Highlights in the context of actual industry, the full range of business and technological issues that must be addressed.

Provides a comprehensive discussion of the required integration of semantic web services (SOA) and business strategies.

Sets a context for critical thinking.

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Project ideas

Read the text Choose a vertical domain that appeals to you

and that is familiar to you. Form your project group of two. More directions will be given in Assignment#1

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Chapter 2: Semantic Enterprises For a concept to be widely adopted it needs

to reach a level of maturity. Semantic web is a new concept that still has

some distance to go before it reaches a point of this widespread adoption.

Lets examine how semantic web (tools and technologies) can help address some of the challenges that companies are facing today.

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Topics for Discussion

The Business context Tools and Technologies for representing semantics Software for semantic services Use cases for semantic representation of

information: Recruitment services Agile manufacturing Patterns and insights in data Integration of scientific data Enterprise search and navigation Compliance and regulation SOA metadata

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Business and Technology Drivers: The Context Read Section 2 of Ch.2 Commercial organizations are always under pressure to perform

financially. Growing interest in being able to integrate all data related to the core

components that drive their success. Integrate not only structured data but also huge volume of unstructured

data collected and generated. Ex: explosive email Many industries are moving towards collaborative business models. Ex:

drug discovery and clinical trials Companies conduct businesses in many countries. Integrating data across department also comes with its challenges. Ability to respond rapidly to change. Data is the most important asset and access to it should be controlled.

Provide API for access and build revenue models around it. Effective use of business data and change/adapt as needed.

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Tools and Technologies: RDF

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a core semantic web recommendation from W3C.

Represents data using triplet: subject-predicate-object

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Tools and Technologies: OWL

OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a more expressive language once a a standard from W3C.

It provides ways to define classes and instances and relationship for modeling real-world objects.

<owl:Class rdf:ID="PotableLiquid"> <rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#ConsumableThing" /> ... </owl:Class>

SPARQL is a query language for RDF and OWL.

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Software

Databases, middleware and applications must be enhanced to work with RDF, OWL and SPARQL.

Remember most of today’s data is in relational databases and in XML formats. So we need converters or interfaces to bridge this gap.

Pages 21-22 has a excellent collection of software initiatives in this direction.

Bottom line is that we need to pay attention to data representation in order to build an efficient SOA.

On to use cases..

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Recruitment Services

hireme:candidate101

hireme.com

Geo:4930956

hireme:candidate102Job1

hireme:candidate102Job2

hireme:candidate102Job3

RDF..

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Recruitment Services

To enable querying across multiple recruiter databases, the hiring company would encourage all its recruitment agencies to make a subset of their data available in RDF.

Common vocabulary, SPARQL endpoint OWL could also be used Conversion to legacy relational info into OWL

or RDF Expose recruitment companies services too.

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Agile Manufacturing

Business drivers: Reuse machines Use ingredients in multiple products Follow trends and latest food craze FDA labeling regulations

Enterprise resource planning: incorporate ontologies Scheduling supported by food ontologies. Services and semantics will make it easier to

incorporate new data that is deemed relevant and help in decision making.

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Identifying of Patterns and Insights in data Business drivers:

Non-structured data : reports, email Need to mine this data Use natural language to extract triplets and store

as RDF which can then be queried. Association of semantics and services will

make the querying this RDF or OWL database very efficient.

Oracle database supports RDF and OWL. Java APIs are available for querying patterns.

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Integration of Scientific Data

Business driver: Drug discovery and development is very expensive and

time consuming process For a drug to get from bench to market takes 5000 screened

compounds, 15 years and nearly $1 billion. Desire to eliminate late stage attrition: identifying and

eliminating drugs that do not have the desirable safety profiles.

Need to be aware of competitive offerings or patents to access market potential

Solution: semantic data integration of heterogeneous databases and services for semantic queries

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Integration of scientific data (contd.) Data types include: chemical structures,

biological sequences, images, biological pathways, clinical observations and scientific papers.

Data warehouse is NOT a solution. We need a unified view with no ambiguity in

terms.. GSK protein needs to different than GSK the company name..

This would allow biological mashups for discovery and decision making.

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Enterprise Search and Navigation OTN (The Oracle Technology Network) is the main

source of technical information for oracle developer community.

Web site provides access to product documentation, product releases, software downloads, etc. Richness, complexity and dynamism of the information made it challenging for traditional search.

Oracle worked with Siderean and created a semantic web: http://otnsemanticweb.oracle.com

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Compliance and Regulation

Increasing complex set of regulations by such congressional acts such as SARBOX and HIPPA.

Policies can be implemented using semantic web.

Semantics and services can keep trace and verify compliance.

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SOA Metadata

Semantics can be used to assign metadata that will help in true dynamic discovery, invocation and composition.

Thus semantics can improve inherent flexibility of SOA infrastructure.

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Summary

We understand that incorporating semantics into the services infrastructure can help advance SOA goals.

Future designs should consider both semantic web concepts and SOA concepts.

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