Introduction to special issue on semantic Web services

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is a new paradigm for distributed computing , slated to shape modern societies in vital areas such as health, government, science, engineering, and business [Spohrer and Riecken 2006; Yu et al. 2007; Medjahed et al. 2003]. It utilizes Web services as the building blocks for developing agile networks of collaborating applications. Web services are the direct answer to the explosion of heterogeneous Web applications that have been developed in the last decade or so. They are increasingly becoming the de facto means to deliver all kinds of functionalities on the Web for direct consumption by programs. Web services may wrap a wide range of Web-accessible resources such as software programs, sensors, databases, and storage devices. This unprecedented proliferation of Web services has been possible because of the intense activity aimed at standardizing the different aspects of Web services (e.g., [WSDL 2007] for description, [SOAP 2007] for messaging, WS-BPEL [OASIS 2007] for orchestration, [WS-CDL 2007] for choreography, [UDDI 2007] for registration and discovery). Because of the already huge investment and lack of a holistic view in the management of Web services, there is a mounting pressure to now build a rigorous foundation for efficiently managing the lifecycle of Web services [Yu et al. 2007; Alonso et al. 2003]. Today's Web is largely populated with data that lack a standard way of interpretation. Ontologies make it possible to build a controlled vocabulary of concepts that can be used to describe and interpret the semantics of Web content unambiguously. This initial view of the semantic Web has now been extended to include Web services. These are poised to be the cornerstone of tomorrow's Web where users would be querying services as opposed to querying data, in effect making the Web service-centric, as opposed to today's Web which is data-centric. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works …