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Although UDDI does not at present play a huge role in the market for
public repositories, it seems (given the product range of vendors) that it plays
an important role in intra- and inter-enterprise usage. Nearly all of the publicly
available services use SOAP as the transport protocol and XML Schema for
type information.
4.5 What's Missing in Web Services?
So far, we have presented the pillars of the next generation of Web technolo-
gies: we have introduced the basic Web technologies, followed by the vision
of the future Web, the Semantic Web. We then discussed Web services as a
means to provide an interoperable platform for application integration using
Web technologies. However, as we can see in Fig. 4.4, the next obvious step is
still missing, and this is what this topic is all about. The term “Semantic Web
Fig. 4.4.
The evolution of the Web
services”, probably first coined in [90], stands for the automation of service us-
age tasks such as discovery, selection, composition, and enactment of suitable
services. This task is accomplished by making services themselves machine-
processable. Just like the way in which the Semantic Web promises to make
the static content of the Web machine-processable via semantic annotations,
the idea of applying similar techniques to Web services is very appealing.
The potential benefits of Semantic Web services have led to the establish-
ment of an important research area, both in academia and in industry. Several
initiatives have appeared for semantically annotating Web services, providing
various descriptions of Web services and their related aspects, which, in turn,
provides various kinds of support for discovery and composition.
Before going into the details of our approach, namely the Web service
Modeling Ontology, and related efforts in the remainder of this topic, we shall
spend the rest of this first introductory part reviewing some more general
considerations.
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