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and the client is naturally interested in the cheapest offer that suites his
needs. Usually, clients consider several offers and compare these in detail
with respect to the monetary amount in question. If several banks pro-
vide their mortgage offers via semantically described Web services, we can
easily imagine an application that compares the offers and automatically
selects the one which is most suitable for the customer's needs. Here, the
WSMO framework assists in creating client requests in the form of for-
mally specified goals, and WSMO mediators allow possible mismatches on
the data and process level to be handled.
Stock market client. Similarly to the business of mortgages, stock mar-
ket support for private and business customers is an important area of
operation of financial institutions. Stock market brokers are interested in
technical solutions that automate customer support to the highest extent
possible in order process as many transactions as possible. Some brokers
allow trading in specific stock options only; therefore, the brokerage avail-
able differs slightly between providers, as do other conditions. As in the
first scenario, we can imagine a end-customer client that observes the stock
market and finds the most appropriate provider for handling a trade re-
quest on the basis of Semantic Web service descriptions provided by stock
market brokers.
11.4 Summary
This chapter has examined examples of applications in order to illustrate and
demonstrate the benefits attainable with Semantic Web service technology. We
observe that the benefits for these applications provided by new technologies
are similar in many application areas. In a nutshell, the essential ingredients
are as follows:
1. Ontologies provide formalized terminology and domain knowledge defini-
tions, which can serve as the basis for advanced, automated information
organization, management, and processing.
2. Web services provide a means for making computational facilities acces-
sible and usable over the Internet via standardized interfaces.
3. Semantic Web services provide semantically enabled technologies for auto-
mated Web service discovery, and composition, and execution of semantic
annotation of Web services.
4. The WSMO Framework allows Semantic Web services to be realized and
and incorporates two additional top-level notions that denote core com-
ponents of Web-service-based systems: Goals for semantically specifying
client requests, and Mediators for handling potential mismatches that
would hamper successful interaction.
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