Semantic configuration Web services in the CAWICOMS project

Abstract

Product configuration is a key technology in today's highly specialized economy. Within the scope of state-of-the-art B2B frameworks and eProcurement solutions, various initiatives take into account the provision of configuration services. However, they all are based on the idea of defining quasi-standards for many-to-many relationships between customers and vendors. When moving towards networked markets, where suppliers dynamically form supply-side consortia, more flexible approaches to B2B integration become necessary. The emerging paradigm of Web services has therefore a huge potential in business application integration. This paper presents an application scenario for configuration Web services, that is currently under development in the research project CAWICOMS1. An ontology-based approach allows the advertisement of services and a configuration specific protocol defines the operational processes. However, the lack of standards for the semantic annotation of Web services is still a major shortcoming of current Web technology. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.