One Document to Bind Them: Combining XML, Web Services, and the Semantic Web

• Harry Halpin, Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems University of Edinburgh, UK
• Henry S. Thompson, World Wide Web Consortium AND University of Edinburgh, UK

Full text:

Track: XML and Web Services

Slot: 16:00-17:30, Friday 26th May

We present a paradigm for uniting the diverse strands of XML-based Web technologies by allowing them to be incorporated within a single document. This overcomes the distinction between programs and data to make XML truly "self-describing." A proposal for a lightweight yet powerful functional XML vocabulary called "Semantic fXML" is detailed, based on the well-understood functional programming paradigm and resembling the embedding of Lisp directly in XML. Infosets are made "dynamic," since documents can now directly embed local processes or Web Services into their Infoset. An optional typing regime for infosets is provided by Semantic Web ontologies. By regarding Web Services as functions and the Semantic Web as providing types, and tying it all together within a single XML vocabulary, the Web can compute. In this light, the real Web 2.0 can be considered the transformation of the Web from a universal information space to a universal computation space.