Foundations For The Web Of Information And Services

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a „Semantic Web“, a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually. One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today’s well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank. In this book, published in celebration of Rudi’s 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi’s early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search. Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a “Web of knowledge, software and services” come true.

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed computing over the Internet. Web Services Foundations is the first installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research. This book specifically focuses on the foundations of Web services and SOC and covers - among others - Web service composition, non-functional aspects of Web services, Web service selection and recommendation, and assisted Web service composition. The editors collect advanced topics in the second book of the collection, Advanced Web Services, (Springer, 2013). Both books together comprise approximately 1400 pages and are the result of an enormous community effort that involved more than 100 authors, comprising the world’s leading experts in this field.

Foundations of Web Technology covers the basics of Web technology while being specialized enough to add value to experienced professionals working in this field. Most books on the Web focus on programmatic aspects of languages such as Java, JavaScript, or description of standards such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML). A book that covers the concepts behind the infrastructure of the Web would be indispensable to a wide range of audiences interested in learning how the Web works, how techniques in Web technology can be applied to their own problem, and what the emergent technological trends in these areas are.

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a „Semantic Web“, a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually. One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today’s well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank. In this book, published in celebration of Rudi’s 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi’s early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search. Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a “Web of knowledge, software and services” come true.

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed computing over the Internet. Web Services Foundations is the first installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research. This book specifically focuses on the foundations of Web services and SOC and covers - among others - Web service composition, non-functional aspects of Web services, Web service selection and recommendation, and assisted Web service composition. The editors collect advanced topics in the second book of the collection, Advanced Web Services, (Springer, 2013). Both books together comprise approximately 1400 pages and are the result of an enormous community effort that involved more than 100 authors, comprising the world’s leading experts in this field.

With more substantial funding from research organizations and industry, numerous large-scale applications, and recently developed technologies, the Semantic Web is quickly emerging as a well-recognized and important area of computer science. While Semantic Web technologies are still rapidly evolving, Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies focuses

Foundations for Efficient Web Service Selection describes the foundational framework for efficient Web service selection. It lays out a theoretical underpinning for the design of models and algorithms for searching and optimizing access to Web services. Excerpts from Prof. Fabio Casati’s foreword: " This excellent book looks at the search problem from a broader perspective. Instead of narrowing down on a specific aspect or subproblem of service search, it dissects and analyzes the fundamental problems in search and presents concrete, applicable solutions as well as the theoretical foundations behind them...One aspect I found particularly significant in the book is the mind shift it generates from thinking about service modeling for the sake of supporting deployment or invocation to modeling for supporting search. This design for search approach is exactly what we do when we design databases because search is what we worry about in that case, and there is no reason why this shouldn’t be the case for services if we want services to be searchable with a similar effectiveness."

Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies lays down foundations for the analysis of media, information, and information technology in 21st century information society, as well as introducing the theoretical and empirical tools necessary for the critical study of media and information. Christian Fuchs shows the role classical critical theory can play for analyzing the information society and the information economy, as well as analyzing the role of the media and the information economy in economic development, the new imperialism, and the new economic crisis. The book critically discusses transformations of the Internet (‘web 2.0’), introduces the notion of alternative media as critical media, and shows the critical role media and information technology can play in contemporary society. This book provides an excellent introduction to the study of media, information technology, and information society, making it a valuable reference tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects such as Media Studies, Sociology of Media, Social Theory, and New Media.