Talk Abstract for Harvard ITM Seminar (ITM = Information Tecnnology & Management, a joint program between Computer Science and Business School) Oct. 2, 2003 5:10pm, in Maxwell Dworkin 221 hosted by Prof. David Parkes Semantic Web Services, Rules, and E-Contracting Prof. Benjamin Grosof MIT Sloan Information Technologies group bgrosof@mit.edu http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof The Web's infrastructure is moving to a second generation based on XML. Web Services and the Semantic Web are two major areas of innovation that promise to raise radically the degree and abstraction level of business process automation. What will the convergence of these two areas -- i.e., Semantic Web Services (SWS) -- look like? Who are the players and what are the early efforts in this convergence? What is its implications for the next-generation Web as a technology platform for e-business? What is the research agenda for SWS? We give an overview of these questions, focusing especially the uses of rules, and discuss some of our own recent work on SWS technologies, standards, business applications, and strategies. Our SweetDeal approach to e-contracting is a pioneering SWS application. SweetDeal illustrates the potential power and versatility of rule-based SWS as e-services and business communication become more knowledge-based/agent-based. It utilizes in part the RuleML draft industry standard which we co-lead. We have been developing three areas of new fundamental theory to meet key technical requirements for SWS. Our advances include knowledge representation techniques for hooking rules to web services, combining rules with ontologies, and handling conflicts between distributed sources of knowledge. We conclude with some discussion of potential early adopter industry/task areas for SWS, e.g., in the supply chain, finance, and travel. Work supported in part by the Center for eBusiness @ MIT Vision Fund and a DARPA Agent Markup Language program award.