Abstract: Semantic Web Service is designed to achieve effective automation of Web Service discovery, composition, and execution. As Semantic Web technology maturating and Web Services proliferating in Internet, Semantic Web Service composition (SWSC) becomes a feasible and practicable way to enable software developers to create applications and systems rapidly. We gave some basic notions and recent research of SWSC, and then classified SWSC approaches according to the methodology they used. Furthermore, we analysed every approach's motivation and its shortages, as well as outlined the essential problems of SWSC. Finally,we concluded and discussed the developing trends.

Key words: Composition approaches, Semantic Web Service, Ontology, Semantic reasoning