This is an edited volume that develops a common understanding of the various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The volume explores trade-offs among existing approaches, and reveals strengths and weaknesses of proposed approaches, as well as which aspects of the problem are not yet covered. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. Professionals can use it to evaluate SWS technology for their potential practical use. The book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

This book carefully defines the technologies involved in web service composition and provides a formal basis for all of the composition approaches and shows the trade-offs among them. By considering web services as a deep formal topic, some surprising results emerge, such as the possibility of eliminating workflows. It examines the immense potential of web services composition for revolutionizing business IT as evidenced by the marketing of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The author begins with informal considerations and builds to the formalisms slowly, with easily-understood motivating examples. Chapters examine the importance of semantics for web services and ways to apply semantic technologies. Topics included range from model checking and Golog to WSDL and AI planning. This book is based upon lectures given to economics students and is suitable for business technologist with some computer science background. The reader can delve as deeply into the technologies as desired.

This book carefully defines the technologies involved in web service composition and provides a formal basis for all of the composition approaches and shows the trade-offs among them. By considering web services as a deep formal topic, some surprising results emerge, such as the possibility of eliminating workflows. It examines the immense potential of web services composition for revolutionizing business IT as evidenced by the marketing of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The author begins with informal considerations and builds to the formalisms slowly, with easily-understood motivating examples. Chapters examine the importance of semantics for web services and ways to apply semantic technologies. Topics included range from model checking and Golog to WSDL and AI planning. This book is based upon lectures given to economics students and is suitable for business technologist with some computer science background. The reader can delve as deeply into the technologies as desired.

Automated Configuration has long been the subject of intensive research, especially in Artificial Intelligence. It is a pervasive problem to be solved, and it is a good test of various knowledge representation and reasoning techniques. The problem shows up in applications such as various electrical circuit design, utility computing and even concurrent engineering. Automated Configuration Problem Solving defines the ubiquitous problem, illustrates the various solution techniques, and includes a survey using these techniques from the mid-70's until the mid-90's. During this time, various general approaches were developed, and then become more specialized. This book covers the development of the general problem solving techniques for automated configuration, which are based on both published academic work and patents.

This is an edited volume that develops a common understanding of the various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The volume explores trade-offs among existing approaches, and reveals strengths and weaknesses of proposed approaches, as well as which aspects of the problem are not yet covered. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. Professionals can use it to evaluate SWS technology for their potential practical use. The book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.