Talk Abstract for CISR Lunch Seminar May 5, 2003 12pm Directions in Semantic Web Services Prof. Benjamin Grosof MIT Sloan Information Technologies group bgrosof@mit.edu http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof Semantic Web Services (SWS), the convergence of Web Services and Semantic Web, is the next major generation of the Web, in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based and agent-based. It is in its early days still, however; much research is needed in order to lay its foundations. In this talk, we discuss some of our recent work on SWS technologies, standards, business applications, and strategies. We have been investigating e-contracting as an application area. Largely from this, we have extracted several SWS requirements, and then have been developing new fundamental theory to help SWS technology meet those requirements. One challenge is how to hook rules (incl. databases) up to web services to automate workflow-type business processes. A second challenge is how to combine rules and ontologies from many Web sources in a consistent and coherent way. One body of our new theory is Situated logic programs for sensing/querying, effecting, and unifying multiple families of rule systems. A second body of our new theory is Description logic programs for consistently and powerfully incorporating ontologies into rule systems. A third body of our new theory is Courteous logic programs for prioritized conflict handling among distributed sources of (rule/fact/ontology) knowledge. We conclude with some discussion of potential early adopter industry/task areas for SWS, e.g., in the supply chain, finance, and travel. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Standard Bio: Benjamin Grosof is Douglas Drane Assistant Professor in Information Technology (IT) at MIT Sloan School of Management. His research is to create and study knowledge-based IT for e-commerce applications. He focuses especially on the technologies, business applications, and strategies for Semantic Web Services (SWS), the convergence of Web Services and Semantic Web. SWS is the next major generation of the Web, in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based and agent-based. The pioneer of inter-operable XML business rules, he co-leads the RuleML emerging industry standards effort. His research also includes several application areas for rule-based SWS in business process automation: e-contracting, which he has pioneered; financial information and reporting; and business policies, e.g, for trust and security. He is Principal Investigator and Rules co-lead in the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program, and a core participant in the newly formed Semantic Web Services Initiative that is creating emerging SWS standards. He interacts extensively with industry, including to do consulting in areas related to his research and standards activities. He joined MIT Sloan in July 2000. Previously, he was a senior research scientist, in software, at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (12 years there), where most recently he conceived and led IBM CommonRules and co-led its application piloting for rule-based XML agent contracting in EECOMS, a $29Million NIST industry consortium project on manufacturing supply chain management. His notable technical contributions also include fundamental advances in rule-based intelligent agents, conflict handling for rules, rule-based security authorization, and integration of rules with machine learning. He is author of over 30 refereed publications, two major industry software releases, and a patent. His background includes two years in software startups, PhD in Computer Science (specialty AI) from Stanford University, and a BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.