Toward the Next Wave of Services: Linked Services for the Web of Data

It has often been argued that Web services would have a tremendous impact on the Web, as a core enabling technology supporting a highly efficient service-based economy at a global scale. However, despite the outstanding progress in the area we are still to witness the application of Web services in any significant numbers on the Web. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art highlighting the main reasons we believe have hampered their uptake. Based on this analysis, we further discuss about current trends and development within other fields such as the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and argue that the recent evolution provides the missing ingredients that will lead to a new wave of services - Linked Services - that will ultimately witness a significant uptake on a Web scale. Throughout the presentation of this vision we outline the main principles that shall be underpinning the development of Linked Services and we illustrate how they can be implemented using a number of technologies and tools we have developed and are in the process of extending.