The Semantic Web services has become a challenging research topic in the last half of decade. Various frameworks offer means
to semantically describe all the related aspects of Semantic Web services, but the solutions to the heterogeneity problems,
inherent in a distributed environment such as the Web, are still to be properly integrated and referred to from the main phases
of the Web services usage. Both data and process heterogeneity, as well as the multitude of functionalities required and offered
by semantic Web services’ requesters and providers hamper the usability of Web services, making this technology difficult
to use. This paper emphasizes the role of mediators in a Semantic Web services architecture, illustrating how the mediators
can enable the Semantic Web services usages in operations like discovery, invocation and composition.
The work is funded by the European Commission under the projects ASG, DIP, enIRaF, InfraWebs, Knowledge Web, Musing, Salero,
SEKT, Seemp, SemanticGOV, Super, SWING and TripCom; by Science Foundation Ireland under the DERI-Líon Grant No.SFI/02/CE1/I13;
by the FFG (Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgeselleschaft mbH) under the projects Grisino, RW2, SemNetMan, SeNSE, TSC, OnTourism.