In recent years, web services have become increasingly important components of the scientific methodology of certain domains. Currently, however, the description and use of most these is purely ‘syntactic’; that is, the semantics of the services are left to the human user to infer or acquire by other means before deciding whether and how to use a service. Consequently, there are opportunities to bridge this semantic gap through the application of emerging semantic web and semantic web service technologies in these domains, thereby enriching and expanding a user’s service interactions. This paper presents its authors’ experiences of the application and use of these emerging technologies in a displicine in which web services already play a key role: bioinformatics.