Significant initiatives such as WSMO, METEOR-S, ODE-SWS, SWSI, and others are creating the engineering platforms for next-generation service-based component federation and service-based application integration. Trial testbeds in large-scale commercial settings are on-going, and progress is promising for the short-to-medium-term uptake of this new technology in enterprise applications development.
The goal of the TAO project is to define a low-cost route to transitioning legacy systems to the open semantic Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which will enable semantic interoperability between heterogeneous data resources and distributed applications. This low-cost migration path will be accessible to both SMEs (which are cost sensitive) and large enterprises (with huge investments in complex and critical IS).
TAO is motivated by the realisation that the time is now right for the creation of an open source infrastructure to aid transitioning of legacy applications, via ontologies and refactoring into Semantic Web Services (SWSs), to SOAs. This will enable the multitude of companies to take-up these new developments without having to re-implement their applications. In this way TAO will widen the uptake of B2B and B2C eCommerce models, which:
TAO will tackle several major bottlenecks of knowledge technologies in the areas of semi-automatic creation of ontologies; automated methods for metadata creation and augmentation of legacy content; and distributed heterogeneous repositories. The project will build on and enhance research and technology from diverse areas into an infrastructure for transitioning legacy systems.