% abstract for U. Maryland seminar 12/06/2002

 Rules + Ontologies for Semantic Web Services
          Prof. Benjamin Grosof
       Information Technology group
      MIT Sloan School of Management
     http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof

Web Services and the Semantic Web are two major areas of innovation
that promise to radically raise the degree and abstraction level of
business process automation.  What will the convergence of these two
areas -- i.e., Semantic Web Services -- look like?  What are its
implications for the next-generation Web as a technology platform for
e-business?

In this talk, we discuss the young, fast growing, research area of
Semantic Web Services (SWS), focusing especially on our work on the
uses of rules and on how to combine rules with ontologies.  The draft
industry standard for Semantic Web rules is RuleML, which we co-lead.
RuleML is based on declarative logic programs, Webized in XML/RDF
syntax, and with optional expressive extensions including for
nonmonotonicity and procedural attachments.  Our SweetDeal approach to
e-contracting is an example application that illustrates the potential
power and versatility of Semantic Web rules, together with ontologies,
for Web Services.  Another such application of ours is the ECOIN
(Extended COntext INterchange) approach to financial information
integration.  Description Logic Programs (DLP) is our new relatively
simple knowledge representation that enables the deep combination of
Description Logic ontologies, cf. W3C's draft standard OWL, with Logic
Program rules cf. RuleML.  DLP is a first step towards meeting several
requirements identified in early SWS applications scenarios.