potential users of web services

Hi all,

I'm little confused about the notion of the term "web services".
When I'm reading papers related to UDDI,WSDL,SOAP they present web services
as a new age of distributed computing and as such they are only useful to
developers (who are trying to build web applicattions) and not to the
end-users. But when I'm reading papers related to DAML-S the idea I'm
getting for web services is different. They are also useful to end users as
it shown by DAML-S motivating scenarios:

Web service discovery
Find me a shipping service that transports goods to Dubai.

Web service invocation
Buy me 500 lbs. powdered milk from www.acmemoo.com

Web service selection, composition and interoperation
Arrange food for 500 people for 2 weeks in Dubai.

Web service execution monitoring
Has the powdered milk been ordered and paid for yet?

There are also numerous papers that use the term service (and not "web
service") and are talking about UDDI, WSDL and DAML-S. What's the difference
between "web service" and "service" if both of them work over Internet? For
example, a search engine (such as google) is a service, but when it is
described in WSDL, published in UDDI and can be invoked using SOAP becomes a
web service? Ia a asp or an HTML form a service or a web service?

In summary which are the potential users of web services (web service
providers, developers, end-users)?

could you please shed some light on this?
regards
Thomi Pilioura

Received on Thursday, 4 April 2002 09:13:05 UTC