This book carefully defines the technologies involved in web service composition and provides a
formal basis for all of the composition approaches and shows the trade-offs among them. By
considering web services as a deep formal topic some surprising results emerge such as the
possibility of eliminating workflows. It examines the immense potential of web services
composition for revolutionizing business IT as evidenced by the marketing of Service Oriented
Architectures (SOAs).The author begins with informal considerations and builds to the
formalisms slowly with easily-understood motivating examples. Chapters examine the importance
of semantics for web services and ways to apply semantic technologies. Topics included range
from model checking and Golog to WSDL and AI planning. This book is based upon lectures given
to economics students and is suitable for business technologist with some computer science
background. The reader can delve as deeply into the technologies as desired.
