In this paper we describe IRS-III which takes a semantic broker based approach to creating applications from Semantic Web Services by mediating between a service requester and one or more service providers. Business organisations can view Semantic Web Services as the basic mechanism for integrating data and processes across applications on the Web. This paper extends previous publications on IRS by providing an overall description of our framework from the point of view of application development. More specifically, we describe the IRS-III methodology for building applications using Semantic Web Services and illustrate our approach through a use case on e-government.

________________________________________________________________________A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain.

________________________________________________________________________A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain.

Abstract. In this paper we describe how we handle heterogeneity in web service interaction through a choreography mechanism that we have developed for IRS-III. IRS-III is a framework and platform for developing semantic web services which utilizes the WSMO ontology. The overall design of our choreography framework is based on: the use of ontologies and state, IRS-III playing the role of a broker, differentiating between communication direction and which actor has the initiative, having representations which can be executed, a formal semantics, and the ability to suspend communication. Our framework has a full implementation which we illustrate through an example application.