Rethinking service oriented architectures in the semantic web

By building a Service Oriented system on top of a semantic repository, the expectation is to get the best of both worlds, i.e. strong modelling capabilities exposed by reusable services, which can be exploited as building blocks for third-parties applications. In reality some "mismatches" make the combination not always optimal. Logic languages such as OWL and object-oriented languages such as Java have different paradigms. On the one hand, Software Oriented Architectures tend to favor stable interfaces for Web Clients, and to offer simplified versions of the objects used by the business logic on the server. On the other hand, Semantic Web clients make use of the rich semantics exposed by a semantic repository, which can be highly dynamic. This paper discusses these mismatches and suggests a different role for Software Oriented Architectures when integrated with Semantic Web technologies. The discussion is based on the experience in building a Web user interface using the services provided by a Service Oriented Architecture on top of a semantic repository.