Web services, E-business, and the semantic web

The 2nd Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was held during June 16–17, 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003, the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the Web to deliver their goods and services, to find trading partners, and to link their existing (maybe legacy) applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today’s e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application fra- work. On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting software - plications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accumulated to demonstrate the difference between just having an online presence and using the Web as a stra- gic and functional medium in e-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.