WWW or What Is Wrong with Web Services

Abstract

A core paradigm of the Web is information exchange via persistent publication, i.e., one party publishes a piece of information on the Web, and any other party who knows the location of the resource can retrieve and process the in- formation at any later point in time and without the need for synchronization with the original publisher. This functionality significantly contributed to the scalability of the Web, since it reduced the amount of interaction between the sender and the recipient. Current approaches of extending the World Wide Web from a collection of human-readable information, connecting humans, into a network that connects computing devices based on machine-processable semantics of data lack this feature and are instead based on tightly-coupled message exchange. In this paper, we (1) show that Web services based on the message-exchange paradigm are not fully compliant with core paradigms of the Web itself, (2) outline how the idea of persistent publication as a communication paradigm can be beneficially applied to Web services, and (3) propose a minimal architecture for fully Web-enabled Semantic Web services based on publication in shared information spaces, which we call Triple Space Computing.