Semantic web services: Standards, applications, challenges and solutions

To share Knowledge coming from disparate and heterogeneous environments, we propose the use of semantic Web services to provide a common Knowledge format and meaning. Semantic Web services would require careful usage of combined technologies. On one hand, XML Web services technology because of their system agnostic nature and the ease of integration and, on the other hand, the semantic Web can define and link Web data in a way that it can be understood and used by software agents. This mixed technology may be a solution to functional interoperability, technical interoperabilty, semantic interoperability and flexible development in heterogeneous environments using the Internet as the main infrastructure. In this paper a survey of semantic Web services is realized to show that they ensure interoperability. Four aspects of Web services are presented: (1) Standards of XML Web services (eXtended Markup Language Web services) and their limits, (2) Languages and Tools of Semantic Annotation, (3) Web Services Composition, and (4) Performance Evaluation. Observations on some new challenges brought by semantic Web services are cited. Furthermore, a comparative study is presented, over the Internet and Intranet, based on numerical results using a discrete event between semantic Web services and distributed middleware, e.g. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and JAVA RMI (JAVA Remote Method Invocation).