The potential of the Semantic Web goes well beyond its applications to information discovery and querying. In particular, it encompasses the automation of Web-based activities and Web-accessible devices as well. When it becomes widespread, the ability to deploy, discover, and use online processing resources and devices, in a significantly automated fashion, will likely be viewed as a major transformation of the Web. Semantic Web services technology is the embodiment of this developing trend.

Work on Semantic Web Services is complementary (to a degree) with commercial work on Web services, and provides greater expressiveness in describing services in a way that software agents can reason about. This reasoning, in turn, can support more powerful and more fully automated approaches to Web service tasks such as service discovery, selection, invocation, execution, composition, monitoring, and recovery.

This presentation will explain the concepts embodied in Semantic Web Services, show how it ties in with developing industry standards, and discuss some existing applications. A perspective will be given on the status of work in this field and next steps towards realizing its promise.