Semantic software engineering tools

Abstract

Recently, the paradigm of software engineering has shifted significantly to service orientation based on Web services. Web Services Description Language interface specifications provide sufficient information to physically access a service. However, these interface descriptions are semantically bleak. This work introduces a number of tools, which were developed to augment strict syntactic service descriptions with semantic information in order to elucidate the meaning of processed data and provided functionality. Semantic Web technologies such as DAML+OIL were supplemented with natural language support for usability improvements both at design- and at runtime.