Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.

This is an edited volume that develops a common understanding of the various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The volume explores trade-offs among existing approaches, and reveals strengths and weaknesses of proposed approaches, as well as which aspects of the problem are not yet covered. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. Professionals can use it to evaluate SWS technology for their potential practical use. The book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

With recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, sensor networks, and enhanced Web services, the original World Wide Web is continuing its evolution into what is being called the Web of Things and Services. Such a Web will support an ultimately interactive environment where everyday physical objects such as buildings, sidew

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, SWSWPC 2004, held in San Diego, CA, USA in July 2004. The 9 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editors, a panel summary and the extended abstract of an invited talk were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Web services and Web processes promise to ease several current Web infrastructure challenges, such as the integration of data, applications and processes. Web services are truly platform independent and allow the development of distributed loosely coupled applications, a key characteristic for the success of dynamic processes.

For advanced web search engines to be able not only to search for semantically related information dispersed over different web pages, but also for semantic services providing certain functionalities, discovering semantic services is the key issue. Addressing four problems of current solution, this book presents the following contributions. A novel service model independent of semantic service description models is proposed, which clearly defines all elements necessary for service discovery and selection. It takes service selection as its gist and improves efficiency. Corresponding selection algorithms and their implementation as components of the extended Semantically Enabled Service-oriented Architecture in the Web Service Modeling Environment are detailed. Many applications of semantic web services, e.g. discovery, composition and mediation, can benefit from a general approach for building application ontologies. With application ontologies thus built, services are discovered in the same way as with single domain ontologies, and the mediation problem between service ontologies is solved. Further, an ontology-based approach to improve service discovery is proposed and validated. Within the service model, a service selection approach oriented at quality criteria is proposed. It normalises diverse qualities of a service in their respective metrics and employs a service selection algorithm based on soundness.

"This book brings together researchers, scientists, and representatives from different communities to study, understand, and explore the theory, tools, and applications of the semantic Web. It joins the semantic Web, ontologies, knowledge management, Web services, and Web processes into one fully comprehensive resource, serving as the platform for exchange of both practical technologies and research"--Provided by publisher.

Over the last decade, ontology has become an important modeling component in software engineering. Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering presents some critical findings on opening a new direction of the research of Software Engineering, by exploiting Semantic Web technologies. Most of these findings are from selected papers from the Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE) series of workshops starting from 2005. Edited by two leading researchers, this advanced text presents a unifying and contemporary perspective on the field. The book integrates in one volume a unified perspective on concepts and theories of connecting Software Engineering and Semantic Web. It presents state-of-the-art techniques on how to use Semantic Web technologies in Software Engineering and introduces techniques on how to design ontologies for Software Engineering.

By introducing Semantic Web technologies into geospatial Web services, this book addresses the semantic description of geospatial data and standards-based Web services, discovery of geospatial data and services, and generation of composite services. Semantic descriptions for geospatial data, services, and geoprocessing service chains are structured, organized, and registered in geospatial catalogue services. The ontology-based approach helps to improve the recall and precision of data and services discovery. Semantics-enabled metadata tracking and satisfaction allows analysts to focus on the generation of a geospatial process model rather than spending large amounts of time in data preparation. “DataType”-driven service composition and path planning can help to automate a range of knowledge discovery processes in a limited geospatial domain. Process planning facilitates the construction of complex services and models for geocomputation. A three-phase procedure to cover the lifecycle of service chaining and to identify the roles of the methods involved is proposed. It includes process modeling, process model instantiation, and workflow execution. The approach is implemented in a prototype system with use cases to demonstrate applicability. The objective of the research is to develop the key technologies for an intelligent geospatial knowledge system based on Web services to automate the data discovery and data preprocessing steps in the distributed Web service environment, to automate a range of knowledge discovery processes in a limited geospatial domain, using the automated construction and execution of service chains, and to facilitate the construction of complex services and models for geocomputation.

Service Composition for the Semantic Web presents an in-depth analysis of aspects related to semantic-enabled Web service modeling and composition. It also covers challenges and solutions to composing Web services on the semantic Web, and proposing a semantic framework for organizing and describing Web services. Service Composition for the Semantic Web describes composability and matching models to check whether semantic Web services can be combined together to avoid unexpected failures at run time, and a set of algorithms that automatically generate detailed descriptions of composite services from high-level specifications of composition requests. The book includes case studies in the areas of digital government and bioinformatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.