% abstract for Center for eBusiness @ MIT lunch seminar 11/20/2002 Semantic Web Rules for Web Services Prof. Benjamin Grosof Information Technology group MIT Sloan 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 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? 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? We overview the young, fast growing, research area of Semantic Web Services, focusing especially on the uses of rules. We discuss the RuleML draft industry standard which we co-lead. We present our SweetDeal approach to e-contracting as an example application that illustrates the potential power and versatility of Semantic Web rules for Web Services. (More details about SweetDeal are given below.) Work supported in part by the Center for eBusiness @ MIT Vision Fund. %%%%%% Abstract from most recent SweetDeal paper, available on webpage, written for Semantic Web audience: "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts using XML Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions by Benjamin Grosof and Terrence Poon. SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the emerging standard for Semantic Web XML rules. Here, we newly extend the SweetDeal approach by also incorporating process knowledge descriptions whose ontologies are represented in DAML+OIL (emerging standard for Semantic Web ontologies) thereby enabling more complex contracts with behavioral provisions, especially for handling exception conditions (e.g., late delivery or non-payment) that might arise during the execution of the contract. This provides a foundation for representing and automating deals about services - in particular, about Web Services, so as to help search, select, and compose them. Our system is also the first to combine emerging Semantic Web standards for knowledge representation of rules (RuleML) with ontologies (DAML+OIL) for a practical e-business application domain, and further to do so with process knowledge. This also newly fleshes out the evolving concept of Semantic Web Services. A prototype (soon public) is running." The process descriptions are drawn in part from the MIT Process Handbook, which is led by Prof. Tom Malone and supported in part by the CeB as well.