A Semantically Enabled Service Delivery Platform

It is expected that virtual factories and enterprises of the future will be able to self-organize in distributed, autonomous, interoperable, non-hierarchical, innovation ecosystems and be dynamically delivered as services, end-to-end along the global value chain. In this scenario, services and service ecosystems become central artifacts, and it is necessary to model and manage them appropriately for automation and scalability. Two main popular architectural approaches for realizing service orientation are WSDL-based SOA and the RESTful style. The level of automation offered by these approaches is limited, and human intervention is required in order to achieve most of the service-related tasks such as discovery, ranking, invocation, and monitoring. In order for service-oriented technologies to scale, they need to offer a significant degree of automation. To address the scalability issues in service composition, this chapter proposes a semantically enabled service-oriented architectural approach (SESA) and its implementation in the form of a platform. The authors detail the principles, models, architecture, and implementation underlying the approach in which lightweight semantics play a central role.