Semantic Web Services and Agents: A Reality Check

This paper aims at analyzing the state of the art of Web services to understand how they can now play a crucial role in the landscape of agent systems, after several years of uncertainty. The study is first outlined by illustrating the main interfaces and protocols that are now emerging and by providing a list of the main repositories of Web services that are really available in the network. The results of the study clearly show that Representational State Transfer (RESTful) services are overtaking Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) services. Moreover, the results emphasize the lack of really effective repositories. The study also highlights the almost total absence of semantics in surveyed repositories, thus severely limiting the accurate rating of Web services. The overall judgment on the situation of Web service repositories is that it is surprisingly still immature, especially in the Italian and European landscapes. This is the reason why we decided to propose a novel Web portal meant to become an active and maintained collector of semantic Web services accessible to users (especially in Italy) and able to create a solid base for developing agent-based service systems.