Tuesday 10 March 2009

5 a day !

No this isn't the NHS recommendation :)

This is how I intend to write my nine month report 5 sentences a day ! I know that is not much but for someone who hates writing it is more than enough. I've been doing it for two days, hopefully I'll keep up the habit.

I spent three hours on Sunday writing the table of contents and formatting the report. In my previous life :) this sometimes happened a day before the deadline.

In some sections I've put down some ideas in psuedo-sentences, so that when I start writing I don't forget them.

Hopefully this approach will help me in the following ways:
-Finish the nine month report earlier.
-Focus not only on understanding my research problem, but on articulating my ideas and convincing the reader. This may help me in finding solutions to problems or formulate evidence for my ideas.
-Gives me a sense of achievement and alleviate some pressure.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

My Methodology at last...

It is amazing how much time I need to finish writing something so simple and short. Well here is the methodology.

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The aim of my PhD is to offer provide a systematic method for creating RESTful Web Services for Semantic resources which then can be implemented in a system. Since Web Services have great impact on businesses, hopefully our work would promote the Semantic Web for the business sector which can expedite the use and research of the Semantic Web.

In the nine month report I will provide a literature review of Semantic Web Services both non-RESTful and RESTful [6]. Current methods for offering Semantic Web Services either build upon the approaches that were used for developing non-Semantic Web Services or only exploit Semantic data RESTfully. In the former there are non-RESTful methods such as SAWSDL [8] WSMO [3] and OWL-S [7], and RESTful ones such as SA-REST[9]. In the latter exploiting Semantic data RESTfully there is the work done in [2] and also Presto [5].

I will provide a context for these methods and how they relate and address their shortcomings and advantages. Some of these methods were only developed recently and literature reviews on Semantic Web Services only discuss some of them [1] [4]. Another aspect of our literature review is that it questions the approach of migrating artifacts introduced to overcome deficiencies in the Web into the Semantic Web.

Another part of my nine month report would be implementing a deployment system similar to Presto. We will be approaching the problem however, from the Web Services perspective in contrast to the knowledge management perspective Presto offered. This will be based on understanding the similarities in aspects or goals of Semantic data and REST. We will then test it on real semantic data, then analyze the results to understand if there are any requirements or considerations on data to be exploited. We will address difficulties and understand the Semantic implication of exposing the resources.

These two steps (writing literature review and implementing the deployment system) would provide a theoretical and practical background for the rest of my PhD. Based on the results we can address more complex issues of Web Services such as service discovery, orchestration, choreography, transaction management and other complicated issues and enhance the deployment system to include these issues as well. Areas of interest that may provide answers are linked open data, ontology engineering, agent communication, reasoning languages and distributed computing.


References:

[1] Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Ranabahu. "Semantics Enhanced Services: METEOR-S, SAWSDL and SA-REST." IEEE Data Engeering Bulliten. 2008. 8-12.

[2] Benson, R. Battle and E. "Bridging the semantic Web and Web 2.0 with Representational State Transfer (REST)." In: Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 6, no. 1 (2008): 61-69.

[3] Bruijn J., Fensel D., Keller U. and Lara R. "Using the web service modelling ontology to enable semantic eBusiness." Communications of the ACM (CACM),
Special Issue on Semantic eBusiness 48, no. 12 (2005): 43-47.

[4] Cabral, L., Domingue, J., Motta, E., Payne, T. R. and Hakimpour, F. "Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison." European Semantic Web Conference. 2004.

[5] Dumontier, A. DeLeon and M. "Publishing OWL Ontologies with Presto." In OWLED 2008 OWL: Experiences and Directions. 2008.

[6] Fielding, R. T. "Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures." PhD thesis. Irvine: University of California, 2000.

[7] "OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. Submission." W3C. November 2004. http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/.

[8] "Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema. Recommendation." W3C. August 2007. http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/sawsdl/.

[9] Sheth A. P., Gomadam K., and Lathem J. "SA-REST: Semantically Interoperable and Easier-to-Use Services and Mashups." IEEE Internet Computing 11, no. 6 (2007): 91-94