SSWAP: Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol

by

Damian Gessler
National Center for Genome Resources
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Friday, October 12, 2007
12:00 Lunch
12:15 Lecture
402 Walter Library

SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol; pronounced "swap") is an architecture, protocol, and running platform for semantically integrating disparate data and services (see http://sswap.info, as in "swap info"). SSWAP is currently driving bioinformatic integration in the plant community under the Virtual Plant Information Network (http://vpin.ncgr.org), an NSF-funded semantic web services project. As an architecture, SSWAP establishes how data, service, and ontology providers, as well as clients and discovery servers can interact to allow for the description, querying, discovery, invocation, and response of semantic web services. SSWAP addresses the three basic requirements of any semantic web services architecture; i.e., i) a common syntax, ii) a shared semantic, and iii) semantic discovery) while addressing three technology limitations common in distributed service systems; i.e., i) the fatal mutability of traditional interfaces, ii) the rigidity and fragility of static subsumption hierarchies, and iii) the confounding of content, structure, and presentation. SSWAP uses the concept of a single, canonical OWL-DL graph to allow data and service providers to describe their resources, to allow discovery servers to offer semantically rich search engines, to allow clients to discover and invoke those resources, and to allow providers to respond with semantically tagged data. The architecture underlies the VPIN platform that is being deployed to aid in integrating plant bioinformatic resources.

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