InfoQ announced the W3C moved the Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) to recommendation status which makes it a new standard.

I'm feeling really stupid about now. I'm trying to think of an occasion where I would use SWSL and SWSO? They both seem like small steps between what we have now in WS-* and the computer on Star Trek Next Generation being able to answer the question What is the nature of the universe?. In my opinion the Web Service standards glorify the request/response pairing found in HTTP. In HTTP (and the WS-*) interactions I don't have any semantical knowledge of the nature of the request or the meaning of the response. Perhaps SWSL and SWSO move us a little bit closer to semantic meaning.

I am wondering then what comes after SWSL and SWSO? Perhaps a roadmap of W3C future specs is needed to eventually get a semantically valid and comprehensive answer like "The universe is a spheroid 705 meters in diameter" and to understand that a spheroid is different than a Google result set.

In the meantime I wonder what W3C's response will be to Ajax? In my experience there is a whole lot more request/response pattern usage in Ajax apps that are now in production than SOAP. A W3C standard interface definition language for Ajax apps is very much needed!

-Frank