Introducing RESTful Semantic Web Services
Web services are key players on distributed software engineering and code reuse. They also play a very important role on the Semantic Web by providing data to semantic software agents, as described by Tim Berners-Lee:
The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.