Semantic web services: current status and future directions

Abstract

An increasing number of Web services are appearing, users as well as software agents and other web services need to be able to find, select, understand and invoke these services. Today, Web services (e.g. travel services, book selling services, stock reporting services etc) are discovered and invoked manually by human users, which hardcode the interaction between their own programs and the available Web services. Web services standards, such as UDDI, WSDL and SOAP, contribute to this vision by facilitating the interoperation between Web services and software agents or users. As a consequence of these standards is becoming by increasingly easier to connect Web services with their clients. The drawback of these standards is that there is no support for automatic interoperation, and therefore they implicitly assume that a programmer will hardcode the interaction between Web services and his own programs.