Elena Simperl

A paradigm shift is taking place in computer science: one generation ago, we learned to abstract from hardware to software, now we are abstracting from software to serviceware implemented through service-oriented computing. Yet ensuring interoperability in open, heterogeneous, and dynamically changing environments, such as the Internet, remains a major challenge for actual machine-to-machine integration. Usually significant problems in aligning data, processes, and protocols appear as soon as a specific piece of functionality is used within a different application context. The Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach is about describing services with metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination, and use. Fensel and his coauthors provide a comprehensive overview of SWS in line with actual industrial practice. They introduce the main sociotechnological components that ground the SWS vision (like Web Science, Service Science, and service-oriented architectures) and several approaches that realize it, e.g. the Web Service Modeling Framework, OWL-S, and RESTful services. The real-world relevance is emphasized through a series of case studies from large-scale R&D projects and a business-oriented proposition from the SWS technology provider Seekda.Each chapter of the book is structured according to a predefined template, covering both theoretical and practical aspects, and including walk-through examples and hands-on exercises. Additional learning material is available on the book website www.swsbook.org. With its additional features, the book is ideally suited as the basis for courses or self-study in this field, and it may also serve as a reference for researchers looking for a state-of-the-art overview of formalisms, methods, tools, and applications related to SWS.

While many Web 2.0-inspired approaches to semantic content authoring do acknowledge motivation and incentives as the main drivers of user involvement, the amount of useful human contributions actually available will always remain a scarce resource. Complementarily, there are aspects of semantic content authoring in which automatic techniques have proven to perform reliably, and the added value of human (and collective) intelligence is often a question of cost and timing. The challenge that this book attempts to tackle is how these two approaches (machine- and human-driven computation) could be combined in order to improve the cost-performance ratio of creating, managing, and meaningfully using semantic content. To do so, we need to first understand how theories and practices from social sciences and economics about user behavior and incentives could be applied to semantic content authoring. We will introduce a methodology to help software designers to embed incentives-minded functionalities into semantic applications, as well as best practices and guidelines. We will present several examples of such applications, addressing tasks such as ontology management, media annotation, and information extraction, which have been built with these considerations in mind. These examples illustrate key design issues of incentivized Semantic Web applications that might have a significant effect on the success and sustainable development of the applications: the suitability of the task and knowledge domain to the intended audience, and the mechanisms set up to ensure high-quality contributions, and extensive user involvement. Table of Contents: Semantic Data Management: A Human-driven Process / Fundamentals of Motivation and Incentives / Case Study: Motivating Employees to Annotate Content / Case Study: Building a Community of Practice Around Web Service Management and Annotation / Case Study: Games with a Purpose for Semantic Content Creation / Conclusions

A paradigm shift is taking place in computer science: one generation ago, we learned to abstract from hardware to software, now we are abstracting from software to serviceware implemented through service-oriented computing. Yet ensuring interoperability in open, heterogeneous, and dynamically changing environments, such as the Internet, remains a major challenge for actual machine-to-machine integration. Usually significant problems in aligning data, processes, and protocols appear as soon as a specific piece of functionality is used within a different application context. The Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach is about describing services with metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination, and use. Fensel and his coauthors provide a comprehensive overview of SWS in line with actual industrial practice. They introduce the main sociotechnological components that ground the SWS vision (like Web Science, Service Science, and service-oriented architectures) and several approaches that realize it, e.g. the Web Service Modeling Framework, OWL-S, and RESTful services. The real-world relevance is emphasized through a series of case studies from large-scale R&D projects and a business-oriented proposition from the SWS technology provider Seekda.Each chapter of the book is structured according to a predefined template, covering both theoretical and practical aspects, and including walk-through examples and hands-on exercises. Additional learning material is available on the book website www.swsbook.org. With its additional features, the book is ideally suited as the basis for courses or self-study in this field, and it may also serve as a reference for researchers looking for a state-of-the-art overview of formalisms, methods, tools, and applications related to SWS.