Semantic Web Service Architecture - Evolving Web Service Standards Toward the Semantic Web

The importance of Web services has been recognized and widely accepted by industry and academic research. However, the two worlds have proposed solutions that progress along different dimensions. Academic research has been mostly concerned with expressiveness of service descriptions, while industry has focused on modularization of service layers - mostly for usability in the short term. This paper is concerned with merging the two streams of progress. The point of departure is the current proposal by IBM. Its proposal is extended by Semantic Web technologies such that a smooth evolution from Web services in the current Web to Web services in the Semantic Web appears possible and - in fact - highly desirable.