Preface

These proceedings contain the papers accepted for presentation at the “Advances in Semantics for Web services (semantics4ws 2006)” workshop held in Vienna, Austria, on September 4, 2006, in conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on Business Process Mangement (BPM 2006).

The main topics of this workshop are related to applicability of semantic technologies to Web services. Web services have added a new level of functionality to the current Web by taking a first step towards seamless integration of distributed software components using Web standards. Nevertheless, current Web service technologies around SOAP, WSDL and UDDI operate at a syntactic level and, therefore, although they support interoperability (i.e., interoperability between the many diverse application development platforms that exist today) through common standards, they still require human interaction to a large extent. For example, the human programmer has to manually search for appropriate Web services in order to combine them in a useful manner, which limits scalability and greatly curtails the added economic value envisioned with the advent of Web services.