Submitted version Adapting the communication capacity of web services to the language of their user community

This paper addresses an interface layer as an integral part of web service technologies that takes wellestablished web service specifications as a wrapper and accepts natural language specifications for the interapplication communication. In a growing complexity of web service networks the architecture of context becomes more and more an issue for both service providers and service requesters. While providers will concentrate more on the basic layers of the activity structure within a service network, the users, i.e. the service requesters, will form ad-hoc collaborations between services for their own specific solutions. We present the Web Service (WS)-Talk layer as a structured-language interface for web services. This “open building block” can be implemented by both the software developer and technology end users who operate on the natural language interface. WS-Talk takes taxonomies for a semantic layer that transforms service descriptions or service requests, expressed in natural language, into specifications necessary for the task-specific composition and use of web services. The objective is to fasten the process of building connected interoperable applications by including more intensively the community of end-users that become an active part in the architecture of web service-based applications. The WS-Talk layer helps web service requesters and providers to create ad-hoc solutions (or rapid prototypes) and it facilitates adoption and management of web services. The paper presents the rationale of WS-Talk and demonstrates its applicability in a prototypical environment providing economic information.