Linked Services and the Future Internet

It has often been argued that Web services would have a tremendous impact on the Internet, as a core enabling technology supporting a highly efficient service-based economy at a global scale. However, despite the outstanding progress in the area we are still to witness this impact. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art highlighting the main reasons we believe have hampered their uptake. Based on this analysis, we further discuss about current trends and development within other fields and argue that the recent evolution, notably Linked Data and Web 2.0 technologies, provides the missing ingredients that will lead to a new wave of services – Linked Services – that will drive the creation of complex systems in the Future Internet. Throughout the presentation of this vision we outline the main principles underpinning Linked Services and we illustrate how they can be implemented using a number of technologies and tools we have developed and are in the process of extending.