Web Services Roadmap: The Semantic Web Perspective

Recently the field of Web services has gained focus both in industry and academia. While industry has been mostly interested in standardisation and promotion of the technology, academia has been looking for ways to fit the technology into other frameworks, such as the SemanticWeb. Anyway, despite of the increased academic and commercial interest to Web services, there are currently only few case studies available about Web services in the Semantic Web context. Moreover, according to authors’ knowledge, there is no publicly available study analysing which data is currently mostly provided/required by Web services. In this paper we target these shortcomings by providing a case study of semantically annotated commercial and governmental Web services. We analyse interaction and potential synergy between commercial and governmental Web services. Also the role ontologies for semantic integration of Web services is analysed. Moreover, we identify the most common data exploited by current Web services.