Semantic Web Services

The promise of dynamic selection and automatic integration of software components written to Web services standards is yet to be realized. This is partially attributable to the lack of semantics in the current Web service standards. To address this, the Semantic Web community has introduced semantic Web services. By encoding the requirements and capabilities of Web services in an unambiguous and machine-interpretable form, semantics make the automatic discovery, composition and integration of software components possible. This chapter introduces Semantic Web services as a means to achieve this vision. It presents an overview of Semantic Web services, their representation mechanisms, related work and use cases.