semantic development paradigm

Conventional software engineering paradigms have reached, or are rapidly approaching the limits of what they can do to cope with massive increases in systems scale (i.e., information silos, explosion of infrastructure, legacy systems, structured and unstructured content, Web Services, APIs). The resulting complexity and inability to handle interoperability generates excessive total cost of ownership. Probably more than 70-percent of yearly IT budgets must be spent just to maintain application silos developed with various kinds of programming and data base languages, IDEs, ESBs and other kinds of tools typically used by organizations across all industries.

Semantics offers a new computing paradigm for SaaS and the Social Web – an approach that deals with the challenges of net-centric infrastructure, knowledge representation, architecture modeling, human relationships and systems that respond and adapt better to change. A composite service implementation can be conceptualized as the semantic definition of a service module that forms part of a common SOA and a common model in a knowledge domain. Inside of the interface definition of a composite service, there may be other interfaces connecting other services and semantic constructs that respond to the SaaS application needs. A composite service has a recursive definition meaning that any service inside may be another atomic or composite service of the model. This makes Semantics a useful tool to define a common architecture, as well as the SaaS applications involved in an IT solution.

Organization of meanings makes possible the efficient use of folksonomy, ontology, and knowledgebases as part of this new paradigm. By adding machine-processable semantics to data the computer can "understand" information which is also understood by humans in the context of what they are doing and, therefore, process it on behalf of them for a specific purpose. Semantic structures are relatively easy to modify for new concepts, associations, properties, instances and constraints. Because semantic technologies can represent data, content, application, and business process resources via a shared knowledge model, SaaS development and maintenance costs are minimized and results can be achieved faster.

In order to accomplish the company’s goals as part of a long research journey, it is QoS Labs’ belief that a change in the conventional object-oriented development paradigm is required. After a decade of actively following the service-oriented wave, the main focus of the company today is proving the semantic-oriented development paradigm, transferring control of the service to the knowledge domain expert and having the end user be an active member of the creative process--both interacting in their own natural language.