Towards Digital Library Mediation for Web Services

Web services and related technologies are a ubiquitous topic within the IT community. Due to their flexible system composition characteristics these technologies can be considered a promising building block for the dynamic networking of people and organizations in our increasingly globalized and quickly changing economies. With the growing number of Web services we are in need of elaborate mechanisms or service location, selection, and access as well as for assuring service quality going far beyond the functionalities of service registries. Fortunately, digital library research and practice provides advanced concepts for these tasks. The paper discusses requirements imposed on content description, structuring, enrichment, and retrieval when considering services as a new type of library content and presents a blueprint for a Web service digital library aiming to support the match-making between service providers and potential service users.