Abstract
A paradigm shift is taking place in computer science: one generation ago, we learned to abstract from hardware to software, now we are abstracting from software to serviceware implemented through service-oriented computing. Yet ensuring interoperability in open, heterogeneous, and dynamically changing environments, such as the Internet, remains a major challenge for actual machine-to-machine integration. Usually significant problems in aligning data, processes, and protocols appear as soon as a specific piece of functionality is used within a different application context. The Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach is about describing services with metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination, and use. Fensel and his coauthors provide a comprehensive overview of SWS in line with actual industrial practice. They introduce the main sociotechnological components that ground the SWS vision (like Web Science, Service Science, and service-oriented architectures) and several approaches that realize it, e.g. the Web Service Modeling Framework, OWL-S, and RESTful services. The real-world relevance is emphasized through a series of case studies from large-scale RnD projects and a business-oriented proposition from the SWS technology provider Seekda.
