Description semantic annotation for web services

Abstract

Web Services have added a new level of functionality to the current Web, making the first step to achieve seamless integration of distributed components. Nevertheless, current Web Service technologies only address the syntactical aspects of a Web Service and, therefore, only provide a set of rigid services that cannot adapt to a changing environment without human intervention. The human programmer has to be kept in the loop and scalability as well as economy of Web Services are limited. The description of Web Services in a machine-understandable fashion is expected to have a great impact in areas of e-Commerce and Enterprise Application Integration, as it can enable dynamic and scalable cooperation between different systems and organisations. These great potential benefits have led to the establishment of an important research activity, both in industry and in academia, which aims at realising Semantic Web Services. This chapter outlines aspects of the description of semantic Web Services. © 2007 Springer.