Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web Services focus on extending traditional Web Services such that their meaning is embedded in the syntactical description. A lot of work, especially in academia, is devoted to this space and the current status and achievements will be highlighted in this chapter. In Section 11.1 the reasons for Semantic Web Services and the main extensions to traditional Web Services are introduced. While some efforts are based on the development of Semantic Web languages, other efforts that are introduced in Section 11.2 use alternative approaches. Section 11.3 discusses in detail the current Semantic Web Service approaches that are based on the technologies developed in the Semantic Web community. Two very “hot topics” in the space are discovery and composition, both of which are discussed in Section 11.4. Section 11.6 provides a summary.