Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web transforms the current, syntactic Web into a Web that is aware of and fully utilizes explicit semantics in order to overcome the prevalent mismatches in understanding and integration of data structures and data vocabulary. With a Semantic Web as a fundamental basis it is possible for human users to find meaningful data and to interact with the Web in a semantically defined and precise way. Going beyond data and information processing, Web Services bring the aspect of dynamic and distributed computation into the current Web by making the Web infrastructure a device for distributed computing on a worldwide scale. However, Web Services, like the current Web, are syntactic in nature, making even simple dynamic composition and computation impossible in an automated fashion, let alone real and complex applications. Therefore, it is necessary to combine the Semantic Web and Web Services into a new paradigm named Semantic Web Services that supports not only distributed computation, but also dynamic discovery and computation of services, ultimately leading to goal-based computation that is fully declarative in nature. This chapter motivates the need for Semantic Web Services and outlines the vision of semantic computation.