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 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."

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. This book is the second installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research and deployments. Advanced Web Services specifically focuses on advanced topics of Web services and SOC and covers topics including Web services transactions, security and trust, Web service management, real-world case studies, and novel perspectives and future directions. The editors present foundational topics in the first book of the collection, Web Services Foundations (Springer, 2013). Together, both books 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.

* Ajax is one of the hottest topics in the developer community right now! and this will be the first Ajax book that offers detailed explanation of how Ajax works and how to use it to best effect. Theory and practice covered immediately in one volume. * Ajax works across many platforms and different groups of developers – this book is designed to be suitable for all those developers across all those platforms, who are interested in the hot new topic of Ajax. * Demand for Ajax knowledge will be strong. Leading technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Adaptive Path, and Amazon are adopting Ajax techniques, and many other companies are doing the same in order to compete with Ajax. This book connect the developer community to the new Ajax functionality.

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.

This volume contains the refereed joint proceedings of two initiatives that have been devoted to the formal foundations of complex systems: the workshops WS-FM:FASOCC 2014 and WS-FM/BEAT 2015. The 11th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods: Formal Aspects of Services-Oriented and Cloud Computing, WS-FM 2014, took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in September 2014. The 12th International Workshop on Web Services, Formal Methods, and Behavioral Types, WS-FM 2015, took place in Madrid, Spain, in September 2015. The total of 8 papers presented in this volume was carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: expressiveness of behavioral models; service-oriented systems, and behavioral types.

This book introduces the main ideas and concepts behind core and extended Web services' technologies and provides developers with a primer for each of the major technologies that have emerged in this space.