This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2002, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2002 in conjunction with CAiSE 2002. The 18 revised full papers presented together with two keynote papers were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on web services, e-business, and e-services and the semantic web.

Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.

"This book presents research related to the application of semantic Web technologies, including semantic service-oriented architecture, semantic content management, and semantic knowledge sharing in e-business processes. It compiles research from expertsaround the globe to bring to the forefront the many issues surrounding the application of semantic Web technologies in e-business"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, SWSWPC 2004, held in San Diego, CA, USA in July 2004. The 9 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editors, a panel summary and the extended abstract of an invited talk were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Web services and Web processes promise to ease several current Web infrastructure challenges, such as the integration of data, applications and processes. Web services are truly platform independent and allow the development of distributed loosely coupled applications, a key characteristic for the success of dynamic processes.

Over the last decade, a great amount of effort and resources have been invested in the development of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks. Numerous description languages, frameworks, tools, and matchmaking and composition algorithms have been proposed. Nevertheless, when faced with a real-world problem, it is still very hard to decide which of these different approaches to use. In this book, the editors present an overall overview and comparison of the main current evaluation initiatives for SWS. The presentation is divided into four parts, each referring to one of the evaluation initiatives. Part I covers the long-established first two tracks of the Semantic Service Selection (S3) Contest – the OWL-S matchmaker evaluation and the SAWSDL matchmaker evaluation. Part II introduces the new S3 Jena Geography Dataset (JGD) cross evaluation contest. Part III presents the Semantic Web Service Challenge. Lastly, Part IV reports on the semantic aspects of the Web Service Challenge. The introduction to each part provides an overview of the evaluation initiative and overall results for its latest evaluation workshops. The following chapters in each part, written by the participants, detail their approaches, solutions and lessons learned. This book is aimed at two different types of readers. Researchers on SWS technology receive an overview of existing approaches in SWS with a particular focus on evaluation approaches; potential users of SWS technologies receive a comprehensive summary of the respective strengths and weaknesses of current systems and thus guidance on factors that play a role in evaluation.

The 2nd Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was held during June 16–17, 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003, the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the Web to deliver their goods and services, to find trading partners, and to link their existing (maybe legacy) applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today’s e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application fra- work. On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting software - plications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accumulated to demonstrate the difference between just having an online presence and using the Web as a stra- gic and functional medium in e-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.