Towards Digital Library Mediation for Web Services

Web services and related technologies are a ubiqui- tous topic within the IT community. Due to their flexible system composition characteristics these technologies can be considered a promising building block for the dy- namic networking of people and organizations in our in- creasingly globalized and quickly changing economies. With the growing number of Web services we are in need of elaborate mechanisms or service location, selec- tion, and access as well as for assuring service quality going far beyond the functionalities of service registries. Fortunately, digital library research and practice pro- vides 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.