SWESE2006

SWESE2006 is the 2nd International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering, held at ISWC2006. The advent of the World Wide Web has led many corporations to web-enable their business applications and to the adoption of web service standards in middleware platforms. Marking a turning point in the development of the Web, the Semantic Web is expected to provide more benefits to software engineering. Over the past five years there have been a number of attempts to bring together languages and tools, such as the UML, developed for Software Engineering with Semantic Web languages such as RDF and OWL. The Semantic Web Best Practice and Deployment Working Group (SWBPD) in W3C has started a Software Engineering Task Force (SETF) to investigate potential benefits. Another recent related international standardisation activity is OMG's Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM).

It has been argued that the advantages of Semantic Web Technologies in software engineering include reusability and extensibility of data models, improvements in data quality, and discovery and automated execution of workflows. According to SETF's recent note "A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers" (http://www.w3.org/TR/sw-oosd-primer/), the Semantic Web can serve as a platform on which domain models can be created, shared and reused. However, are there any other potential benefits related to the reversal of this approach and the use of Semantic Web concepts in the field of Software Engineering? Could the Web-based, semantically rich formality of OWL be combined with emerging model driven development tools such as the Eclipse Modelling Framework to provide some badly needed improvements in both the process and product of software development activities? What is it about the amalgamation of OWL, UML and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that could make a difference? Certainly, there appear to be a number of strong arguments in favour of this approach but consensus on the best way forward, or if there is indeed a way forward at all has not yet formed. This workshop seeks to explore and evaluate this area.

The popularity and power of the MDA approach has made many software development practitioners familiar with modeling and appreciative of additional levels of abstraction in their models. In parallel, Semantic Web language standards have arrived with substantial tool support that also provide a means of describing models, but providing different capabilities than the UML and MOF models typical of MDA tools. The advantages of bridging these approaches has been compelling enough for tool vendors to build products which do this and to spend considerable effort defining an OMG standard for these products (ODM). While the primary purpose of these efforts is to enable SW development with MDA tools, the bridge could also be exploited in the other direction. We think with the standards for this bridge close to completion, the time IS right to explore the potential created by the flow of capabilities of the Semantic Web into the software development environment.

The workshop organizers believe that the informal nature of the workshop, located at the major event on the Semantic Web, will aid to further exchange between practitioners and researchers working on these and other issues related to Semantic Web enabled software engineering by providing a forum for discussing the major challenges of the area and the different approach being taken to resolve them. In fact, the 1st SWESE workshop at ISWC2005 turned out to be a huge success with more than 50 participants in the full day workshop.