Building blocks of a semantic Web framework - requirements analysis and architectural implications

The Internet initially spread to all areas of business, information and communication with amazing speed. Recent enhancements to its communicative and informative effectiveness have been much slower in acceptance. This is caused by the increased complexity of these new services. No longer can new technologies (e.g. Web services and ontologies) be used by anyone (as is true for e.g. HTML). Quite to the contrast the new technologies require a deep understanding of the topics involved (e.g. agent architectures and knowledge engineering). One of the foremost tasks in the near future thus is to provide abstraction layers that facilitate the usage of these new technologies. Our WASP framework aims to simplify the access and reuse of technologies like Web services, agents and large-scale knowledge bases. This paper describes the individual building blocks, the basic requirements and the necessary infrastructure to connect the individual building blocks in more detail.