Platform Reto KRUMMENACHER a,1 , John DOMINGUE b , Carlos PEDRINACI b and Elena SIMPERL a a Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria b Abstract. Establishing Web services as resources on the Web opens up productive, but challenging new possibilities for open, highly dynamic and loosely-coupled service economies. In addition, lifting services to the semantic level provides a sophisticated means for automating the main service-related management processes and the composition of arbitrary functionalities into new services and businesses. In this article we present the SOA4All approach to a global service delivery platform. By means of semantic technologies, SOA4All facilitates the creation of service infrastructures and increases the interoperability between large numbers of distributed and heterogeneous functionalities on the Web. Keywords. SOA, Semantic Web services, Global Service Delivery Platform Introduction The Web service technology stack offers various means for making software functionality accessible as remote components, independent of particular programming languages and platform implementations. Significant work was done in specifying architectures, middleware, languages, communication protocols and process execution engines that can support the creation of complex distributed systems by seamlessly coordinating Web services. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) foster the development of such distributed and loosely-coupled solutions whereby service providers advertise the services they offer, and solution providers and software developers access the service repositories to search for suitable services to invoke for the given purpose or to build and execute processes. Within SOA4All, the core ideas of SOA are re-thought with the aim of making services ubiquitous on the Web. The chosen approach is to combine the principles that underpin the Web, Web 2.0, semantics, context and SOA and to derive an architecture based on these principles. In particular, from the Web we take openness, decentralization, and the fact that communication is driven by a ‘persistent publish and read’ paradigm rather than by messaging. Semantic Web languages are leveraged to provide automation and increase understanding of various common tasks during the life-cycle of services, such as their discovery and composition. From Web2.0 we take the value of easy-to-use interfaces and of social networks. Finally, automated context 1 Corresponding Author: Activity Leader, University of Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 21A, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria; E-mail: reto.krummenacher@sti2.at. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK SOA4All: Towards a Global Service Delivery Towards the Future Internet G. Tselentis et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2010 © 2010 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-539-6-161 161