Semantic Web Services - Concepts and Technology

Although the Internet provides a world wide infrastructure for information provision and communication, the initial web technology stack has substantial draw-backs with regard to automated web content processing. Consequently, the Semantic Web is envisioned as the next evolution step of web technology that shall overcome these deciencies. Ontologies and Web Services are identied as the key technologies: every resource and every data element interchanged shall be semantically de- scribed by ontologies; Web services shall provide access to and usage of computational resources over the Web in order to combine the benets of the Internet with computational power. The emerging concept of Se- mantic Web services aims at an integrated technology for amending the Web with semantically enhanced information processing and distributed computing, hence realizing the vision of the Semantic Web. This article explains the idea of Semantic Web services and presents technological so- lutions developed around the Web Service Modeling Ontology WSMO, a comprehensive framework for Semantic Web Services.