The research is important because the Web Services technology has a tremendous potential for the creation of complex services to support ecommerce and human activities, creating networks of co-operating e-services. These networks are open and may accommodate dynamically the addition and removal of new services and the disappearance of other ones.
Various complex and intelligent services will be available, to support most of our activities, possibly creating a new social environment for interacting and co-operating with other people. The same availability of these services will be critical for allowing us to carry on such activities, in the same way as today we cannot work without having access to corporate or external knowledge sources.
These goals will be achieved by combining results coming from different research areas, such as Semantic Web languages (for describing service properties, i.e., models), service composition techniques (for describing service interaction) as well as model-based reasoning and diagnosis. As regards the latter, in particular, recent results and techniques for diagnosing and repairing (or recovering from failures) complex physical devices, and for designing easily diagnosable and reliable devices, will be applied to Web Services networks. The achievements of WS-Diamond will be critical to create a new generation of Web Services which will support users in an available and reliable way. Interaction and advice from industry will guarantee a constant attention to issues coming from real world problems and applications.