Book excerpt: Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed computing over the Internet. Web Services Foundations is the first installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research. This book specifically focuses on the foundations of Web services and SOC and covers - among others - Web service composition, non-functional aspects of Web services, Web service selection and recommendation, and assisted Web service composition. The editors collect advanced topics in the second book of the collection, Advanced Web Services, (Springer, 2013). Both books together comprise approximately 1400 pages and are the result of an enormous community effort that involved more than 100 authors, comprising the world’s leading experts in this field.