Semantic Web Services

Abstract

In this service-oriented world, online services are important parts of web offerings. Online shopping, flight booking, hotel booking, navigation, public transport services, government services, community services, and media services are parts of our daily lives. However, the range of service offerings is widening. In the information technology (IT) industry, for example, there is also an endless variety of services. In the more and more popular cloud computing environments, the fundamental service models are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Storage; Platform as a Service (PaaS), such as WHM, Microsoft Azure, and the Google App Engine; and Software as a Service (SaaS), such as Hosted Exchange, GoogleApps, and NetSuite. Further services in the IT industry contain, but are not limited to, Database as a Service (DBaaS), Graph as a Service (GaaS), Storage as a Service (STaaS), Test Environment as a Service (TEaaS), API as a Service (APIaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). Web services often have web sites that provide e-commerce, navigation with dynamic maps, remote control of a physical device, and so on. The mainstream XML-based standards for web service interoperability specify the syntax only, rather than the semantic meaning of messages. Semantic Web technologies can enhance service-oriented environments with well-defined, rich semantics. Semantic Web services leverage Semantic Web technologies to automate services and enable automatic service discovery, composition, and execution across heterogeneous users and domains.