DISCOVERY AND CONTRACTING OF SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES.pdf

Discovery and Contrating of Semantic Web Services /2005/04/FSWS/Submissions/20/Discovery_and_... 1 of 9 04/17/2006 03:10 AM DISCOVERY AND CONTRACTING OF SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES Position Paper for the Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services, Innsbruck, Austria, June 2005 Authors: Rubé n Lara* Daniel Olmedilla+ *Tecnología, Información y Finanzas (TIF), Spain Email: rlara ’at’ afi.es +L3S Research Center and Hanover University, Germany Email: olmedilla ’at’ l3s.de ABSTRACT The automatic location of services that fulfill a given need is recognized as a key step towards dynamic and scalable integration. In order to achieve such automation, a model that considers the dynamic aspects of service provision and how they affect service descriptions, and that enables an efficient and accurate discovery and contracting of relevant services, is required. In this paper we propose such a model, paying special attention to the distinction between services and Web services and how these two concepts relate to each other. The border between Web service discovery and service contracting is discussed, and what kind of descriptions can be expected at each step is analyzed. We outline requirements on frameworks for semantic description of Web Services in the light of our model, and propose techniques for realizing the dicovery and contracting steps. INTRODUCTION Semantic descriptions of Web services can be exploited to improve the process of locating services that achieve a given requester goal, enabling its (total or partial) automation. While a number of proposals for automating the discovery of Web services are available (e.g. [Paolucci et al., 2002], [Li and Horrocks, 2003]), these hardly consider the dynamic aspects of service provision and how Discovery and Contrating of Semantic Web Services /2005/04/FSWS/Submissions/20/Discovery_and_... 2 of 9 04/17/2006 03:10 AM they affect service descriptions. As a consequence, these approaches do not explicitly address important i