Semantic WebIan Horrocks
University of Manchester, UK
slides (PDF)
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Semantic Web initiatives seem the way to go in order to allow machines to
access and reason about the information stored on the Web. One of the main
approaches involves structuring and representing the information in terms of
ontologies. Ontologies have the advantage of allowing the share of structure
and knowledge among the people or machines that generate Web pages in a given
domain.
In terms of current state of the art with respect to ontologies design, the
standard is DAML+OIL, which is based on RDFS and XMLS. Now, the standarization
committee is working on the new standard, OWL, which will be mostly based on
DAML+OIL. Therefore, anyone willing to begin representing the knowledge in an
ontology for the Web, or provide automated services can already use DAML+OIL.
In the discussion during the evening, two ways of using this standard in
relation to planning and scheduling were conceived:
- Using the Web as a repository of information semantically represented as ontologies using DAML+OIL (or OWL): in this case, planners and schedulers could access this information automatically, reason about it, and post the output back to the Web in that format or provide it to the user or another software.
- Setting up planning and scheduling services through the Web: domains and problems could be represented in DAML+OIL, and be called through Web interfaces from remote places. The output would also be provided in the same type of formats as before. In relation to this, it was discussed the possibility of defining a XPDDL, which would be based either in DAML+OIL or its base (XML or RDF).
Workflow ManagementDavid Hollingsworth
Fujitsu Services, UK and Workflow Management Coalition (Chair of the Technical Committee)
slides (ppt)
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The Workflow Management Coalition, WfMC, is a non-profit organisation formed
by, mostly, industrial partners developers of workflow software, though it
also embraces academia and end users organisations. They have been working for
a long time on defining standards for the interfaces of workflow systems. The
result is the Workflow Reference Model
which defines five interfaces:
- process model definition tools: defines the interface between modelling tools and workflow management tools. Basically, it uses WPDL (Workflow Process Definition Language), which is being re-designed towards XPDL (XML based). Since WPDL is stable, people willing to interface current planning and scheduling techniques or tools with workflow tools can already use this language for specifying the process models. The Workflow Management TCU Roadmap provides a summary of the different aspects that should be considered when performing such task.
- users: defines how to provide information to users of the workflow tool with respect to the work (tasks, activities) that they have to accomplish
- automated systems: defines the interface with the other type of agent that can accomplish tasks, other software tools
- other workflow systems: given that currently many organisations are trying to interface their processes with suppliers and clients, it is needed to define the interface among the workflow management tools of the other organisations
- system administrator: any complex organisation should have a workflow management administrator that is in charge of monitoring, and controlling the overall performance of the system.
Planning language standardsLee McCluskey
University of Huddersfield
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Planning and scheduling researchers (basically planning up to now) have
defined an standard that is being used within the Planning Competition, held
every two years since 1998, PDDL (now in its PDDL2.1 version). This is
considered a fruitful direction so that better planners are developed (more
and more considering time and resources information) and also providing a
better understanding of the different approaches. However, there is a
potential problem in that focusing too much on this language and its
associated competition might lead the area towards domains and problems
characteristics that have no counterpart in the industry (at least in some
sectors). Therefore, with respect to the goal of this workshop, it seems that
in order to provide solutions for industries on Web tasks, and workflow
management tools, there should be an attempt to define interfaces between
planning and scheduling languages and those used or going to be used in the
next future, such as OWL, or XPDL.