Towards Light-weight Semantic Descriptions for Decentralized Service-oriented Systems

Service oriented computing has significantly changed the style of designing software for distributed communication systems. However, the promise to loosen the dependencies of application components to allow the usage of any functionally equivalent services was only kept in part. The emergence of expressive semantic descriptions of services, the consequent adaptation of service matching, and the introduction of autonomic service composition concepts meant a real step towards openness and reusability. Semantic markup languages describing service interfaces, characteristics, and functionality, paired with inference and advanced querying methods facilitated situation-aware service adaptation and rapid service creation. However, most of today's solutions for the semantic enhancement of service architectures are tied to specific application domains and do crucially increase the development complexity. For this reason, our work indicates approaches aiming at light-weight semantic service descriptions, their autonomous creation, and adaptation. Moreover, simplified service descriptions address a broader range of computing devices, including those with limited physical capabilities, e.g., regarding their available processing power and memory capacity. Finally, we address decentralized methods for the progressive creation and adaptation of service descriptions utilizing novel interaction models.