Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in
current IT research and development. Dieter Fensel and his coauthors
deliver a profound introduction into one of the most promising
approaches - the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief
presentation of the underlying basic technologies and standards of the
World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, they detail all the
elements of WSMO from basic concepts to possible applications in
e-commerce, e-government and e-banking, and they also describe its
relation to other approaches like OWL-S or WSDL-S. While many of the
related technologies and standards are still under development, this
book already offers both a broad conceptual introduction and lots of
pointers to future application scenarios for researchers in academia and
industry as well as for developers of distributed Web applications.