Members of the OASIS international standards consortium have formed a committee to define an architecture to incorporate the application of semantics into service-oriented systems, providing intelligent mechanisms for consuming Semantic Web services. The new OASIS Semantic Execution Environment (SEE) Technical Committee will develop guidelines, justifications, and implementation directions for an execution environment for Semantic Web services.

Professor Dieter Fensel, Ph.D., (pictured) of DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute), proposed co-chair of the OASIS SEE Committee, declared, "This is an exciting development on the journey to IT systems at last offering flexible intelligent services without complicated software or application integration issues. 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 semantic descriptions."

"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, 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. "The Committee will define how existing methods, such as W3C's Semantic Web, Owl, and Topic Maps, can be deployed in an SOA."

"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," said senior Ovum analyst, Bola Rotibi in commenting on the announcement. "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."

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), and the 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.