TOWARDS SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES: A BRIEF OVER- VIEW

Nowadays remote and ubiquitous access to data and applications is an essential need in business environments which poses several challenges to software developers. A Service Oriented Architecture, implemented as a set of interoperating Web Services relying in standard Web protocols, is a solution to these problems which is supported by the majority of software companies. However the current framework still has serious lacks when facing complex tasks as service discov- ery or result composition. Research in Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services tries to cover these short-comings. This paper overviews the current state of Web Services technologies focusing in standard languages SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. OWL-S, WSMO and SWSF extensions, proposed by Semantic Web researchers as the conceptual basis for improved future Semantic Web Services, are additionally presented.