Who's afraid of Web services?

I was giving this lightning talk (3min) at a W3C meeting last week, titled like this entry. Below is the text, accompanied by these pictures.

(s1)
Hi ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jacek Kopecky and I'll start with a few pictures, if you excuse their amateur quality, and then I'll have a few questions.

(s2) we invented computers to work for us (s3) and they do, but we need to do a lot of programming (s4) and other setup before we can sit back, (s5) relax, sip coffee and wait for the results.

computers can also (s6) make other computers work, we know this from distributed systems. But what if I could only (s7) tell the computer what I want and it would do what I mean?

Semantic web services (s8) attempt a step in that direction. Combining semantic web with web services, trying to enrich both toward automation.

(s9) The semantic web needs services to fulfill its promise. Even the famous article in the the scientific american talks about how the computer will make use of automated services.

(s10) The Web itself needs services, and we're already getting them, as part of what's called web 2.0.

(s11) Web services need semantics, because enterprises have problems handling thousands of web services while visionaries talk about billions of them.

Semantic web services promise some automation: (s12) given a user goal, the computer can find suitable web services, put them together, rank them according to my criteria, negotiate with them, and even invoke them.

But most members here don't seem to want to touch semantic web services, not even with a ten-foot stick. I'm here to ask why.

Part of it is that there is (s13) too much promise and hype and (s14) too few success stories, and we, the semantic web services researchers, are to blame, but I have here a wider community so I'll try to shift a bit of the blame on you. 8-)

Are Semantic web services unpopular because (s15) the web community, the semantic web community and the web services community don't talk to each other?

could semantic web services researchers reach out better (s16) to the semantic web ppl? or to the web ppl? or to the web services ppl?

we have all these sorts of people and then some in this room, so please tell me what it is that we don't deliver to you, which if we did, would make you want to help us.

Maybe we can, in the end, (s17) achieve some automation. Thank you very much.

Posted at 2042 on Tue, May 15, 2007 in category Work | TrackBack | Comments feed
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