Product Description

In just a few years, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services not only gained considerable interest in computer science research, they were also taken up with unanimity by all major international players in the IT industry. However, and in spite of all existing standards, in most SOA applications much human intervention is still required, for example to interpret the semantics of informal descriptions or to harmonize incompatible data schemata. Semantic Web services combine Web services communication technology with the intelligent processing of ontology-based metadata to achieve highly integrated enterprise application integration scenarios, for service look-up, schema matching, or protocol negotiation, for example. Rudi Studer and his team deliver a self-contained compendium about this exciting field, starting with the basic standards and technologies and also including advanced applications in eGovernment and eHealth. The contributions provide both the theoretical background and the practical knowledge necessary to understand the essential ideas and to design new cutting-edge applications. They address computer science students as well as researchers in academia and industry who need a concise introduction and state-of-the-art survey of current research, and the book can easily be used as the basis of a specialized course on Web services or Semantic Web applications. In addition, IT professionals will be able to assess the potential and possible benefits of this new technology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143803 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-06-11
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

About the Author
Rudi Studer is Full Professor in Applied Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. His research interests include knowledge management, Semantic Web technologies and applications, ontology management, data and text mining, service-oriented architectures, peer-to-peer systems, and Semantic Grid. Rudi Studer is also director in the research department Information Process Engineering at the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe and one of the presidents of the FZI Research Center as well as co-founder of the spin-off company ontoprise GmbH that develops semantic applications. He is engaged in various national and international cooperation projects being funded by e.g. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the European Commission, the German Ministry of Education and Research, and industry. He is president of the Semantic Web Science Association and Editor-in-chief of the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web.

Customer Reviews

taking SOA and Web Services to the next step
Some books have come out on Service Oriented Architecture, like SOA Principles of Service Design (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl). But while seemingly comprehensive, they only scrape the start of the problem. Much remains to be done, when applying to real world data sets. This book by Studer et al can be considered a next step in SOA.

It points out huge problems that still remain. Earlier books on SOA and Web Services tend to focus on the syntactical issues. Which is the first and simplest step. But given a schema written by one party, there is typically a need for manual impedance matching with another schema on the same topic. Issues arise due to the writing, understanding and maintenance of ontologies.

The book shows what the human in the loop has to do. Along with extended examples of actual realistic problems, taken from German government data.