Pulling It All Together

As we mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, our intent was to quickly and briefly expose you to a variety of emerging and in some cases well-established technologies that are relevant to the future of Web services. Very soon, it will be technically possible to have an ecology of software and hardware Web services and a community of software agents living on various platforms, including small devices, monitoring users and systems needs, discovering and communicating with each other as peers, using ontologies to determine meaning and intent, discovering services as required by the issuing context, negotiating and generating just-in-time partnerships, composing services as needed, and fulfilling the initiating need (see Figure 9.5).

Figure 9.5. The possible future of interacting semantic Web services and agents.