Service-oriented computing has recently gained extensive momentum in both industry and academia, and major software vendors hook on to the service paradigm and tailor their software systems towards services in order to accommodate ever-changing process and product requirements in today's dynamic market environments. While dynamic binding of services at runtime was identified as a core functionality of service-based environments as far back as 2000, its industrial-strength implementation has yet to be achieved. The main reason for this is the lack of rich service specifications, concepts, and tools to process them.

This book introduces advanced concepts in service provisioning and service engineering, including semantic concepts, dynamic discovery and composition, and illustrates them in a concrete business use case scenario. To prove the validity of the concepts and technologies, a semantic service provisioning reference architecture framework as well as a prototypical implementation of its subsystems and a prototypical realization of a proper business scenario are presented. Thus the book goes way beyond current service-based software technologies by providing a coherent and consistent set of technologies and systems functionality that realizes advanced concepts in service provisioning.

Both the use case scenario and the provisioning platform have already been substantiated and implemented by the EU-funded Adaptive Services Grid project. The book therefore presents state-of-the-art research results that have already passed a real industrial implementation evaluation which is based on the work of over 20 European partners cooperating in the field of semantic service provisioning.

Dominik Kuropka works as technical product manager of the planningIT product for alfabet meta-modelling AG. Before this, he was the leader of the Adaptive Services Grid project, which is part of the basis of this book. His fields of interest are enterprise architecture modeling, planning and management as well as workflow management, service-oriented architectures, information retrieval and reference modeling.

Peter Tröger works as adjunct lecturer and researcher at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. His research interests are middleware-based distributed systems and operating systems with a focus on Grid Computing and service-oriented environments. Peter works as co-chair in the Open Grid Forum standardization body and collaborates with different industry partners in the area of Web service standards and SOA runtime governance.

Steffen Staab leads the research group on Information Systems and Semantic Web (ISWeb) at the University of Koblenz-Landau and is a co-founder of ontoprise GmbH. His interests lie in researching core technology for ontologies and semantic web as well as in applied research for exploiting these technologies for knowledge management, multimedia and software technology.

Mathias Weske is chair of the business process technology research group at the Hasso Plattner Institute of IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam. His research interests include business process management, process choreographies, and service-oriented computing.