Demonstrations

During the nineties, object orientation of software source code made possible component orientation of applications. Recently, novel component oriented runtime environments have paved the way for service oriented infrastructures. Since there may be a considerable number of service providers, which offer very similar functionality, it tends to be difficult to choose the most appropriate service and to guess the appropriate operations by interpreting syntactic operation names as provided by state of the art Web service interface descriptions. We used semantic Web technologies like DAML and OWL for constructing ontologies, which present the meaning of processed data and provided functionality. These ontologies were used to annotate both syntactic Web service descriptions as well as object oriented C# source code. This demonstration introduces the set of tools that was developed in order to implement the idea of semantic software engineering. Web Services Description Language documents are annotated with semantic information using a WSDL Annotator. A Microsoft Visual Studio add-in was developed in order to annotate C# source code and to facilitate declarative service requests that may be embedded with common C# source code. A programmer may even dictate such requests using natural language input. The Microsoft SOAP toolkit was extended to preserve semantic annotations when C# proxy classes are automatically generated from WSDL files as well as when annotated Web service descriptions are automatically generated from annotated C# source code. Our set of integrated tools increases efficiency and productivity when developing and incorporating Web services using any object oriented programming language.