Introduction

Abstract

The principled combination of semantic and service-oriented technologies has been motivated by the need to provide robust and scalable interoperability solutions in both closed and open IT environments. Several research efforts have addressed the formal semantic descriptions of computational artifacts in order to automate their use and reuse in software systems. Based on previous works in formal software specification and knowledge engineering, the latest development in this area is the concept of “Semantic Web Services” (SWS), which foresees the usage of service descriptions via machine-understandable metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination and usage. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Semantic Web Services in step with the actual practice in the field. It introduces the main socio-technological components that ground the Semantic Web Services vision (Web and service science, but also Web services in their SOAP and REST version) and several approaches realizing it, as well as its recent resource-oriented extensions and underlying communication and coordination infrastructure. The real-world relevance is pinpointed through a series of case studies in large-scale R&D projects from the last years and a business-oriented proposition by the Semantic Web Services technology provider Seekda.