Semantic Web Services: an Evaluation of a Framework Implementation

The World Wide Web has become a vast and often chaotic source of all sorts of information and services. Computers have become the tool of the modern knowledge worker, and the Web constitutes both office and library. The current tools of the Web are unable to utilize its full potential, which limits the efficiency of the knowledge workers. The goal of the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web Services, is to solve this problem by introducing an evolution of the Web that is understandable for machines and humans. The objective of this master thesis was to extend the evaluation in my project on Semantic Web Services frameworks from fall 2007, by evaluating a framework implementation. The evaluation was to focus on the framework implementation's ability to realize the goals of Semantic Web Services, how easy a Semantic Web Service could be created for the given implementation, and to evaluate the available documentation and tools. The goal of the evaluation was to come up with suggestions for improvements for the framework implementation. The WSMO framework and its WSMX implementation was chosen as subject of the evaluation, based on the evaluation from the first project. The framework was evaluated by implementing a Semantic Web Service from a constructed scenario. The development of this service resulted in positive and negative experiences with the WSMX implementation, experiences that were used in the evaluation. The evaluation focused on WSMX, the available documentation, and the two tools WSMT and WSMO Studio. The results of the evaluation were suggestions for improvements for WSMX, the documentation, and the tools. By making the changes and additions that were suggested, I believe that the development of Semantic Web Services for the WSMX implementation of the WSMO framework could be made easier