CMS is part of a research community developing the internet, but the internet is now almost 50 years old, and designed long before many of today’s challenges were apparent. Mobility, device heterogeneity, peer-to-peer relationships and traffic, trust management and web services are all now becoming major problems for current technologies. Both US and Japanese governments have instigated large-scale programmes intended to define a next generation internet, and the European Union has begun its own Future Internet initiative.

The kick-off meeting in Bled brought together government ministers, academics and industry leaders to discuss what Europe needs from the internet in coming decades. This resulted in a Future Internet ‘manifesto’, the Bled declaration. This vision will shape forthcoming calls in the EU’s Framework Programme 7. For the sixty FP7 projects already running, the effort is on shepherding related research projects along a cohesive axis. Collaborations are sought through six working groups:

• network architecture and mobility
• the internet of things
• content creation and delivery
• services and architectures
• trust, security, and privacy
• experimental facilities and testbeds

But the real focus is interdisciplinary collaboration, with almost half of each group comprising ‘outsiders’ from other areas.

For CMS, the Future Internet is vindication of its approach: there is already widespread agreement across the participants that semantics and services will play key roles in any future internet. CMS participant project ServiceWeb 3.0 is one of the coordinators, and CMS co-chair John Domingue will also co-chair the services and architectures group.

Forthcoming events related to the Future Internet include a continuation of the Bled event at the Future Internet Assembly in Madrid, and the Future Internet Symposium, a research conference exploring the cross-domain issues for semantics and services. The services working group wiki is publicly readable.

WSMO-Lite, which describes a lightweight service ontology and annotation mechanism for Web Service Description Language (WSDL), has been accepted for the European Semantic Web Conference 2008 (you can download the paper here).

WSMO-Lite which is currently under the review process in the CMS WG, has been co-authored by Tomas Vitvar, Jacek Kopecky, Jana Viskova and Dieter Fensel. In the paper we define the service ontology describing constructs for services’ information model (ontology) as well as functional services’ descriptions (i.e., categorization, conditions and effects). Using the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL), we define a mechanism for annotation of various WSDL components with WSMO-Lite semantic descriptions. In addition, we define the algorithm to derive the behavioral service descriptions in a form of Abstract State Machines (ASM) from functional annotations (i.e. conditions and effects) of WSDL interface operations and we outline a usage of semantic annotations for a number of services’ use tasks such as service discovery, composition, selection, mediation, etc.

The Conceptual Models for Services Working Group (CMS WG) has been approved by the STI International board of management in December 2007 and it will start with the beginning of February 2008. The chairs of the working group are: John Domingue (Open University, UK), Tomas Vitvar (STI Innsbruck, Austria), and Michal Zaremba (STI Innsbruck, Austria). The working group has now the website up and running and the first phone conference is scheduled for the second week of February 2008 (feel free to subscribe to the calendar of the working group related events).

With the new CMS WG, the mission of the WSMO WG will be finalized. The WSMO WG has significantly contributed to the research of the Semantic Web Services by developing the conceptual model WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology), the language WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) and the architecture and a reference implementation WSMX. All this work has been mainly carried out within a number of EU FP6 funded projects (e.g., DIP, SEKT and Knowledge Web).

The goal of the CMS WG is to continue this endeavor in two main forms. Firstly, the group maintains WSMO adding updates depending on requests from Semantic Web Service researchers and practitioners. Secondly, using WSMO as a starting point the group develops a number of new ontologies including WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology which uses RDFS as the description language and defines mechanisms to annotate WSDL descriptions using SAWSDL, MicroWSMO, a semantic annotation of RESTful services, and Semantic Annotations of Processes, an ontology for describing processes which are implemented as Web services (see the working group charter for more information).

We are looking forward to working with you in the new CMS WG!