Leveraging Semantic Web technologies for business component specification

Although component-based development (CBD) is among the predominant software engineering paradigms today, numerous issues still remain preventing business component marketplaces from taking off. For example, it is state of the practice to apply different notations and modeling languages for the specification of different aspects of a business component. Besides the fact that there is a lack of standards for holistic approaches to multi-faceted business component specification, the individual specification techniques very often are not powerful enough to allow for the reliable and efficient discovery and retrieval of matching components or the automatic deduction of statements about the semantic and syntactic compatibility of components for application composition. In this article, we argue that CBD processes can greatly benefit from the use of Semantic Web technologies for business component specification. The Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, can provide a means to integrate existing specification approaches and add new value by superimposing a common knowledge representation layer on all specification artifacts, thus enabling semantic queries and reasoning about the properties of business components.