7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop

Best practices, methodologies and tools to help in dealing with these artifacts and operations in Semantic Web Services development are thus in high demand. Moreover, there are few scientific method of comparing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of functionalities claimed. Other than the SWS Challenge, there is no standard testbed to assess the robustness and applicability of proposed technologies to real world problem scenarios. Progress in scientific development and in industrial adoption in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) is thereby critically hindered.

The SWS Challenge initiative is specifically designed to develop a standard methodology and testbed for the evaluation of Semantic Web Services technologies. In addition to this this initiative, there is the associated W3C SWS Testbed Incubator which has issued a W3C Incubator Group Report about the evaluation methodology developed within the SWS Challenge.

This workshop, under the umbrella of the ISWC 2008 conference will provide a common platform for the researchers and developers of the Semantic Web Services to present and discuss the latest progress in the area, to identify the gap between the Semantic Web Services research and required methodologies, tools as well as the applications.

First, it will focus on finding out different ways, methodologies, tools and technologies for evaluation of Semantic Web Services tools and applications, continuing the work of the SWS Challenge, and the Incubator. Participants should be familiar with the previous work of these initiatives, including the Incubator Group Report above. Papers on this subject are highly welcome, and need not be accompanied by a Challenge solution to be evaluated.

Thus, participants are invited to discuss the Challenge's current evaluation methodology. Insights gained during the workshops will provide additional input to the W3C SWS Testbed Incubator Group which aims at standardizing an evaluation methodology for semantic web services technology.

Second, the workshop will continue the SWS Challenge which is an ongoing and continuous experiment in evaluating the functionality of SWS technologies. The curent set of evaluations are posted on this wiki and proposed solutions will follow the current evaluation methodology also available here. Participants are invited to propose new scenarios to be incorporated into the official SWS-Challenge testbed.

The activity most closely related to the SWS Challenge is the S3 Contest on Semantic Service Selection. However, the SWS Challenge and the S3 contest are working in different parts of the reseach space. The organizers agree that they are related and both should be explored. In fact, the cross-referencing between both events on their web sites and inter-linkage of other activities (e.g., common use of test services) has been agreed between organizers.