Semantic Discovery and BPEL

BPEL is leading standard, co-authored by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, BEA, SAP et all , for business process language to orchestrate Web services.It enables manual composition of services to create complex business process flow. But it lacks semantic expressiveness, which limits the automatic discovery, composition and customization of partner services required to address the growing need for highly dynamic IT environment. Also it is still far from fulfilling the SOA promise of “really” loosely coupled systems.

Semantic discovery can provide the missing functionalities with the help of semantic web and inference technologies. Semantic Web technologies will enable description of services in computer interpretable format and that will make it possible to perform automatic selection, composition and customization of services.

For a real implementation of a semantic discovery service, please refer to ksl.Stanford.edu/sds