Reference: Martin, D.; Burstein, M.; McDermott, D.; McGuinness, D.L.; McIlraith, S.; Paolucci, M.; Sirin, E.; Srinivasan, N.; Sycara, K. Bringing Semantics to Web Services with OWL-S. World Wide Web Journal (to appear). 2006.
Abstract: Current industry standards for describing Web Services are focused on ensuring interoperability across diverse platforms, but do not provide a good foundation for automating the use of Web Services. Representational techniques being developed for the Semantic Web can be used to augment these standards. The resulting Web Service specifications enable the development of automated agents that can interpret descriptions of unfamiliar Web Services and then employ those services to satisfy user goals. OWL-S (OWL for Services) is a set of notations for expressing such specifications, based on the Semantic Web ontology language OWL. It consists of three interrelated parts: a profile ontology, used to describe what the service does; a process ontology and corresponding presentation syntax, used to describe how the service is used; and a grounding ontology, used to describe how to interact with the service. OWL-S can be used to automate a variety of service-related activities involving service discovery, interoperation, and composition. A large body of research has been based on OWL-S, and it has made possible the creation of a substantial set of open-source tools for developing, reasoning about, and dynamically utilizing Web Services.
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