Transition of legacy systems to semantically enabled applications: TAO method and tools

Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web technologies in developing services and applications has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many legacy systems have been developed without considering the potential of the Web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a tedious and expensive process, which carries a significant risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies, allowing the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such strategies. In this paper we propose a methodology and its tool support for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services, which allow users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platforms automatically or semi-automatically. The transition of the GATE system is used as a case study.