The major objective of the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) is to bring current Web technology to its full potential by combining and improving recent trends around the Web.
	Semantic Web Technology Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, referred to the future of the current WWW as the "semantic Web" - an extended Web of machine-readable information and automated services that extend far beyond current capabilities. The explicit representation of the semantics underlying data, programs, pages, and other Web resources, will enable a knowledge-based Web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. Automated services will improve in their capacity to assist humans in achieving their goals by "understanding" more of the content on the Web, and thus providing more accurate filtering, categorization, and searches of information sources. This process will ultimately lead to an extremely knowledgeable system that features various specialized reasoning services. These services will support us in nearly all aspects of our daily life - making access to information as pervasive, and necessary, as access to electricity is today.
	Web Service Technology The current Web is mainly a collection of information but does not yet provide support in processing this information, i.e., in using the computer as a computational device. Recent efforts around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP try to lift the Web to a new level of service. Software applications can be accessed and executed via the Web based on the idea of Web services. Web services can significantly increase the Web architecture's potential, by providing a way of automated program communication, discovery of services, etc. Therefore, they are the focus of much interest from various software development companies. Web Services connect computers and devices with each other using the Internet to exchange data and combine data in new ways. The key to Web Services is on-the-fly software composition through the use of loosely coupled, reusable software components. This has fundamental implications in both technical and business terms. Software can be delivered and paid for as fluid streams of services as opposed to packaged products. It is possible to achieve automatic, ad hoc interoperability between systems to accomplish organizational tasks. Examples include both business application, such as automated procurement and supply chain management, but also non-commercial applications as well as military applications. Web services can be completely decentralized and distributed over the Internet and accessed by a wide variety of communications devices. Organizations can be released from the burden of complex, slow and expensive software integration and focus instead on the value of their offerings and mission critical tasks. The dynamic enterprise and dynamic value chains would become achievable and may be even mandatory for competitive advantage.
	Intelligent Web Services Still, more work needs to be done before the Web service infrastructure can make this vision come true. Current technology around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP provide limited support in mechanizing service recognition, service configuration and combination (i.e., realizing complex workflows and business logics with Web services), service comparison and automated negotiation. In a business environment, the vision of flexible and autonomous Web service translates into automatic cooperation between enterprise services. Any enterprise requiring a business interaction with another enterprise can automatically discover and select the appropriate optimal Web services relying on selection policies. Services can be invoked automatically and payment processes can be initiated. Any necessary mediation would be applied based on data and process ontologies and the automatic translation and semantic interoperation. An example would be supply chain relationships where an enterprise manufacturing short-lived goods must frequently seek suppliers as well as buyers dynamically. Instead of employees constantly searching for suppliers and buyers, the Web service infrastructure does it automatically within the defined constraints. Other applications areas for this technology are Enterprise-Application Integration (EAI), eWork, and Knowledge Management.