Semantic Configuration Web Services in the CAWICOMS Project

Product configuration is a key technology in today’s highly specialized economy. Within the scope of state-of-the-art B2B frameworks and eProcurement solutions, various initiatives take into account the provision of configuration services. However, they all are based on the idea of defining quasistandards for many-to-many relationships between customers and vendors. When moving towards networked markets, where suppliers dynamically form supplyside consortia, more flexible approaches to B2B integration become necessary. The emerging paradigm of Web services has therefore a huge potential in business application integration. This paper presents an application scenario for configuration Web services, that is currently under development in the research project CAWICOMS. An ontology-based approach allows the advertisement of services and a configuration specific protocol defines the operational processes. However, the lack of standards for the semantic annotation of Web services is still a major shortcoming of current Web technology.