TAO is about how existing ‘legacy’ applications can migrate to open, semantics-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
We will create an open source infrastructure to aid transitioning of legacy applications to SOA, via ontologies and refactoring into SWS. This will enable a much larger group of companies to exploit semantics without having to re-implement their applications. The results will be validated in two high-profile case studies: a comprehensive open source platform (with thousands of users) and a data-intensive business process application (managing a multi-million business).
Now is the time to do this, because significant recent initiatives have built up strong foundations for practical semantic SOA. They have shown how new systems can profitably deploy semantics as a lingua franca for modelling the points of contact between software components at a higher level than previous technology. Now we need to show how existing applications can profit from semantics-based architectures. TAO will ease the adaptation of the applications to these SOA through semantic web-service bootstrapping – an innovative methodology, based on state-of-the-art ontology learning and semantic data integration.
DURATION: 1 March 2006 – 28 February 2009
