Semantic Annotations for WSDL

The other day the W3C released a new recommendation called Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema. Semantic annotations are used to connect an element in a structural model to an element in a semantic model. The semantic model element describes the meaning or purpose of the structural element when it appears in a document. Most message processors only care about the document structure but a human reader cares about the document meaning as well. There are many different ways that meaning can be recorded. This standard just provides a way to construct the connections.

I've never had anyone ask for a feature like this so I'd be curious to know how you'd want to use it. I could see some benefit to annotating a business process or an application entry point with information about the meaning of the exchanged messages. Originally, these systems had both their structure and semantics described by text documents. There has been standardization for describing structure but the semantics have remained in those text documents. It's interesting to be able to recouple the two together so that they don't get separated.