A preview of a paper to be presented at ESWS 2004 (European Semantic Web Symposium).

Abstract:
The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly con-strained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are con-sumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we char-acterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimen-sions.

Authors: Liliana Cabral, John Domingue, Enrico Motta, Terry Payne and Farshad Hakimpour

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