Semantic Web Services approaches

Semantic Web Services aim to better support the life-cycle of Web services and service-based applications by exploiting semantic descriptions of services. Research in this field has been considerably active and has produced a large number of ontologies, representation languages, and integrated frameworks supporting the discovery, composition and invocation of services among other tasks. In this chapter we provide a thorough, albeit necessarily brief, overview of the conceptual models devised so far, giving the reader a perspective on the relationships, coverage and applicability of each of them together with pointers for gathering further insights and details about these solutions and related software