The Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was heldMay27-28,2002inconjunctionwithCAiSE02,the14thInternationalC- ferenceonAdvancedInformationSystemsEngineering.Theworkshopcomprised three tracks: a track on Web services co-chaired by Barbara Pernici (Politecnico di Milano) and Jian Yang (Tilburg University); a track on e-business, co-chaired byMariaE.Orlowska(UniversityofQueensland)andChristophBussler(Oracle Corporation, USA); and a track on e-services and the Semantic Web, co-chaired byRickHull(BellLaboratories,LucentTechnologies,USA)andSheilaMcIlraith (Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, USA). The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the web to deliver their goods and services, to ?nd trading partners, and to link theirexisting(maybelegacy)applicationstootherapplications.Webservicesare rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed c- putation and application framework.
On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting so- ware applications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accu- lated that demonstrates the di?erence between just having an online presence andusingtheWebasastrategicandfunctionalmediumine-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as in marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifactstoenableautomatedreasoningaboutthem.Whenappliedtoe-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.