The Internet of Services and the Internet of Things are major building blocks of the Future
Internet. The digital enterprise of the future is based not only on mobile social and cloud
technologies but also on semantic technologies and the future Internet of Everything.
Semantic technologies now enable mass customization for the delivery of goods and services
that meet individual customer needs and tastes with near mass production efficiency and
reliability. This is creating a competitive advantage in the industrial economy the service
economy and the emerging data economy leading to smart products smart services and smart
data all adaptable to specific tasks locations situations and contexts of smart spaces.
Such technologies allow us to describe revise and adapt the characteristics functions
processes and usage patterns of customization targets on the basis of machine-understandable
content representation that enables automated processing and information sharing between human
and software agents. This book explains the principal achievements of the Theseus research
program one of the central programs in the German government's Digital 2015 initiative and
its High-Tech Strategy 2020. The methods toolsets and standards for semantic technologies
developed during this program form a solid basis for the fourth industrial revolution
(Industrie 4.0) the hybrid service economy and the transformation of big data into useful
smart data for the emerging data economy. The contributing authors are leading scientists and
engineers representing world-class academic and industrial research teams and the ideas
technologies and representative use cases they describe in the book derive from results in
multidisciplinary fields such as the Internet of Services the Semantic Web and semantic
technologies knowledge management and search user interfaces multimodal interaction and
visualization machine learning and data mining and business process support manufacturing
automation medical systems and integrated service engineering. The book will be of value to
both researchers and practitioners in these domains.
