Towards intelligent services: a case study in chemical emergency response

In a short period the Web has become an important part of our lives. However, the full potential of the Web is still not realized. Two recent developments - Web services and the semantic Web - are steps in the direction of utilizing the full potential of the Web. Web services allow applications to utilize the Web for automatically extracting (and updating) information while the semantic Web enterprise promises to provide the infrastructure that allows intelligent Web services to be rapidly created and deployed. However, with this comes the task of transforming the traditional Web-based systems to Web-services over the semantic Web. In this paper, we demonstrate how an existing successful Web-based system for providing help to first responders of chemically hazardous emergencies (called E-plan) can be converted into a Web-services based model using the semantic Web and intelligent reasoning technologies. Our efforts can be regarded as a case study in converting monolithic Web-based applications to a more agile, rapidly deployable intelligent Web-services model.