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SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES
Peter Bartalos
From the beginning of Web existence a huge evolution of it is observed. We see this from
different points of view. There is a progress of the Internet technologies which are the bases
for making the Web working. The research in communication and data store brought new
approaches to transport and collecting huge amount of data. This caused that the Web is
enlarging in volume of resources available and also in number of users. The Internet and thus
also Web is now available for a big number of people from all over the world. It has extended
into households and is increasingly used not only in business-to-business interaction. There
are also new types of resources available on the Web. It has moved forward from a network
of documents. Now it offers also functionality and operation performance. Altogether
are called services. Here belong for example online e-shops, various reservation systems,
e-banking applications and others.
Web possibilities allow developing applications where the basic building components
are services, i.e. service oriented architecture (SOA) based applications. SOA allows creating
applications from loosely-coupled, distributable, platform independent services. The
prominent technology to implement these services is web services. Web services are software
systems we can interact with through the Web (more detailed definition is presented later).
Web services are mainly used today in practice to integrate applications. Different
systems are wrapped into a web service and this way other systems can benefit from their
functionality not caring about the platform it is working on. However, this kind of utilization
of web services is effective, they are intended to be used in more sophisticated way too.
There is a vision to use services for almost any kind of operation, not only for those which
can be performed using applications preprogrammed for certain area and thus limited. The
aim is to recognize the users’ goal, solve the problem by using available services and to bring
a solution. The intention is to exploit wide opportunities of the Web to automatically deal
with various user’s objectives. It is not clear which of the approaches are matured enough
to do this.
One initiative which wants to bring a solution is the Semantic web services approach.
The basic idea is to add additional meta-data to web services’ description. This should allow
working with them in automatic manner. This includes the discovery of web services to
find the usable ones. Based on the available meta-data we are able to find more relevant
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