DERI is delighted to announce its participation in forming' the new OASIS Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) Technical Committee.
As service orientated architecture grows in stature, and offers the potential to be the leading paradigm in the IT sector, this Technical Committee (TC) aims to lay the foundations to build semantics into this field right from the start.
The new OASIS Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) Technical Committee will develop guidelines, justifications, and implementation directions for an execution environment for Semantic Web services. These services would be built upon the Semantic Web stack as standardized at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the goal of being introduced into the W3C's Semantic Web Infrastructure.
Bola Rotibi, Senior Analyst, Ovum:
"The technology of Semantic Web services envisions easy access to various systems and facilitates the consumption of the functionality exposed by these systems on the Web. Seamless integration, ad-hoc cooperation between various business parties or dynamic collaborations on the Web can be achieved only if tools for handling semantically enhanced services are provided."
According to Professor Fensel, Scientific Director of DERI, and the proposed co-chair,
"This is an exciting development on the journey to IT systems at last offering flexible intelligent services without complicated software or application integration issues. These services would be built upon the Semantic Web stack as standardized at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the goal of being introduced into the W3C's Semantic Web Infrastructure. In the future we will be talking about services rather than software, and these services can only reach their full potential if they are enriched by standardised descriptions We're delighted to be working with OASIS to achieve this vision."
"Our work at OASIS will combine Semantic Web Services and Grid Computing in an effort to take advantage of their differing, but closely related perspectives to provide the infrastructural architecture for machine-to-machine enabled communication and cooperation,"
added Michal Zaremba, Ph.D., of DERI, Galway, and proposed co-chair of the OASIS SEE Committee.
"It's important to note that this OASIS Committee will not be developing a specification, but rather it will focus its efforts on describing the ways in which knowledge management and semantic tools can augment SOA,"
noted James Bryce Clark, director of standards development at OASIS.
In addition to considering the integration of the W3C Semantic Web stack, the committee will also examine the role of Topic Maps in the solution set for Semantic Web services
Academic and research institutions worldwide are strongly supporting this effort. Members of the OASIS SEE Committee include representatives of DERI (Ireland), INRIA Institut National de Recherche en Informatique (France), Open University (UK), Software Research & Development Center (Turkey). Global companies such as Fidelity and Nortel are also actively involved.
The OASIS SEE Committee will operate under Royalty Free on Limited Terms mode, as defined by the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights Policy. The Committee's first meeting will be held 11 November 2005, and participation remains open to all companies, non-profit groups, and individuals. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committee's work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment.
Notes for Editors:

• DERI: DERI is one of the leading research organisations in the world developing Semantic technologies. DERI has two main research centres, DERI Galway, at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and DERI Innsbruck at the Leopold Franzens University, Innsbruck, Austria. Together they employ approximately 100 staff. http://www.deri.org/
• OASIS: Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. The consortium produces open standards for Web services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Approved OASIS Standards include AVDL, CAP, DITA, DocBook, DSML, ebXML CPPA, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registry, OpenDocument, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI, WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRP, WS-Security, XACML, and XCBF. http://www.oasis-open.org/