Ontological Implications of SOA panel discussion moderated by Professor Bill McCarthy (Michigan State University) on 06/30/2005

* Topic andquot;Interoperability Concerns in the Growth of Service Sciences -- Ontological Implications of Service Oriented Architectureandquot; * Moderator Professor Bill McCarthy of Michigan State University * Panelists Duane Nickull (Adobe / UN/CEFACT) - Service Oriented Architecture (or someone representing the UN/CEFACT work on the SOA) George Brown (Intel / Arizona State U / IMS) - POSE (Pattern Ontology for the extended Service Enterprise) Michael Gruninger (NIST) - PSL, Ontological Engineering * ONTOLOG forum Wiki page details http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_06_30 * Abstract (by BillMcCarthy) Interoperability Concerns in the Growth of Service Sciences -- Ontological Implications of SOA Traditionally, trading partners -- both within and between firms -- trafficked in bundled tangible products like consumer goods or partially assembled finished goods. Many early e-commerce standards assumed implicitly product-based exchanges. Increasingly however, the growth in exchange and bundling of Services in the US and in other economies has supplanted tangible goods as the raison d'etre of international and domestic commerce. Estimates of the percentage of the gross domestic product of the US due to services (as opposed to goods) range as high as 80%. This trend has led to increased interest in services and the establishment of new research centers like the proposed andquot;Center for Services Sciencesandquot; at U.C. Berkeley. A good of overview of such trends is the brief article by Henry Chesbrough: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9b743b2a-0e0b-11d9-97d3-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=6f0b3526-07e3-11d9-9673-00000e2511c8.html In e-commerce, this growth in service provision has been mirrored by the advent of Service-Oriented Architectures which support integration and creation of composite solutions (bundles of services) from loosely-coupled components assembled both within an enterprise (outputs from legacy applications) and outside of the enterprise (typically XML-based Web services). Whether or not the integrated services originate from incompatible operations inside the firm or from incompatible vendor interfaces from outside the firms, semantic inconsistencies, redundancies, and discrepancies make the vision of integrated services an ontological problem. The purpose of this panel is to explore the ontological implications of Service Sciences in general and of Service-Oriented Architectures in particular. We will start our Ontolog session with some general comments from notable practitioners in the SOA and ontology areas. We will then open up the discussion to more general comments and critiques.