WSML — a Language for WSMO

7.7 Summary

In this chapter, we have presented the Web Service Modeling Language, WSML, a language for the specification of various aspects of Semantic Web services, based on WSMO. WSML brings together different logical-language paradigms and unifies them into one syntactical framework, enabling the reuse of proven reasoning techniques and tools. Unlike other proposals for the Semantic Web and Semantic Web service languages, WSML has a normative human-readable syntax that makes a separation between conceptual and logical syntax, thereby enabling conceptual modeling according to a language-independent metamodel (WSMO), while not restricting the expressiveness of the language for the expert user. With the use of IRIs (the successor of URIs) and the use of XML and RDF, WSML is a language based on the principles of the Semantic Web and allows seamless integration with other Semantic Web languages and applications.

The definition of an interoperability layer between the description logic and rules paradigms (i.e. WSML-Core) enables the use and extension of the same core ontology for a number of different reasoning tasks supported by a number of different reasoners, most notably subsumption reasoning using description logic reasoners and query answering using logic programming reasoners.