I set up my research work and the one of the group I contributed to create in CEFRIEL around the idea of addressing the e-challenges (e-business, e-healthcare, e-government, e-content, e-learning, e-culture, etc.) using semantic technologies. I noticed that solving the e-challenges means addressing first commons problems in Knowledge Management (KM) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). I layed down a track for Semantic technology development with an increasing risk/impact trade-off. I use this track to position the research activities and the prototypes.

KM solutions take immediate advantages of the intrinsic ability of the Semantic Web in managing knowledge. As a matter of fact finding, extracting, representing, sharing, interpreting, maintaining and composing knowledge items with Semantic Web standards is much easier than before their introduaction. The second place to apply Semantic Web is Enterprise Application Intgration (EAI). Adressing EAI means dealing with heterogeneity of data, protocols, and processes and mechanization of service usage (i.e. discovery, adaptation, composition and monitoring). However, the representational and modelling capability of Semantic Web are not enough for achieving a new generation of EAI solution, they must be combined with the computational support of Web Services in the so-called Semantic Web Services. The enhancement of KM and EAI solution with Semantic Web poses the basis for addressing the e-challenges, because they combine a technology driven aspect that Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services encompass and a user driven aspect that these technology enable.

Following this approach, since 2001 my group in CEFRIEL has developed some prototypes to prove the effectiveness of Semantic Web technologies in a variety of scenarios and application domains. In particular, I focused the activities on:

• 2001/oggi- Semantic Knowledge Management: semantic portal, semantic navigation e semantic search.
• 2003/oggi- Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architecture: Semantic Web Services, Web Service discovery, Web Service Mediation e Triple Space Computing
• 2005/oggi- Model-Driven Semantic Web Service Application development: combinare tecniche e strumenti di Software Engineering e Semantic Web (services)
• 2007/oggi- Merging Reasoning and Search on the Semantic Web: stream reasoning