  The growing proliferation of distributed information systems, allows
organizations to offer their business processes to a worldwide audience through
Web services. Semantic Web services have emerged as a means to achieve the
vision of automatic discovery, selection, composition, and invocation of Web
services by encoding the specifications of these software components in an
unambiguous and machine-interpretable form. Several frameworks have been
devised as enabling technologies for Semantic Web services. In this paper, we
survey the prominent Semantic Web service frameworks. In addition, a set of
criteria is identified and the discussed frameworks are evaluated and compared
with respect to these criteria. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the
Semantic Web service frameworks can help researchers to utilize the most
appropriate one according to their needs.
