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The spec for the SOA Reference Model includes a very good discussion of the differences between the SOA approach and an OO ( "Object-Oriented" ) approach to web services, although strictly SOA is not about web services. In their definition, SOA is "a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains". Sounds a bit vague to me, but it may be the clearest definition to date.

Good no-nonsense advice in the form of questions and answers about BPM. Unlike some overly-technical approaches to BPM, it shows a keen awareness of the importance of business rules and business issues in general.

Be prepared to zoom the text size in your browser.

Another good introduction and overview is Co-ordination Protocol and BPEL, which, despite its title, turns out to be solid business-oriented discussion of BPM issues. Some of the links do not seem to be functioning correctly.

In IBM's tutorial on Web service design patterns, they use several concrete examples of XML messaging. The result is interesting.

Consider one of the XML messages used in the example:

The main link is part of O'Reilly Publsihing's ever-widening archipelego of XML sites - many of the articles are not related to web service design patterns per se. Sometimes one gets the impression that the real purpose of design patterns is to sell books about design patterns, but they are very useful nevertheless.

 From th RuleML site:

The participants of the RuleML Initiative constitute an open network of individuals and groups from both industry and academia. ... Our main objective is to provide a basis for an integrated rule-markup approach that will be beneficial to all involved and to the rule community at large.

 A More Humane Machine Readable Language ?

The proponents of these markup languages represent their creations as an improvement over implementing rules by programming logic, and that is true from the standpoint of flexibility, but I'm not sure if they are any more readable than programming logic to ordinary human beings. But this make the end user completely reliant on ontology editors to interact with the final representation of the knowledge. Are markup languages the strength or the soft underbelly of the Semantic Web ?

Another tier of terminology involves the "Web 2.0", or sometimes "Web 3.0". It's not entirely clear what either term means. One presumes that the earlier advances of "Web 1.0" and "Web 1.5" technology were restricted to improved content, database integration, graphical widgets, etc. However, far from clarifying definitions, using the term "Web X.0" seems to generate yet another level of debate on its own.

An old concept from AI, the semantic network, may have a second life in the Semantic Web. In a semantic network, ontologies of distinct types are interpreted within evaluation networks that get their meaning from the semantic relations in which they participate. In a sense, the subjects of the ontolgies discover their roles by consequence of relationships rather than by declaration or assignment.

The End of Google ?

On June 26, 2006 at 5:20am EST, the Evolving Trends web site published an article entitled "Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?". By June 28th, two days later, the article had reached 650,000 people - by July 1st, it was being referenced by over 6,000 other sites and had been read by close to 2,000,000 people.

Swoogle

A very interesting phenomena is Swoogle, a sort of Google for the Semantic Web

There is also an interesting comment on the Swoogle Blog, probably belonging more properly to previous section.