What is needed for semantic service descriptions? A proposal for suitable language constructs

The big promise of service-oriented computing is the ability to form agile networks, i.e. networks of loosely-coupled participants that cooperate by dynamically discovering and invoking each other’s services at run-time. The major prerequisite for this promise to be redeemed is an appropriate semantic service description. In this paper, we identify requirements towards such a service description language and show that neither of the two main current approaches, namely OWL-S and WSMO, is able to fully meet these requirements. We then proceed to suggest additional language constructs and a prototypical language, the DIANE Service Description (DSD) that implements these constructs. We explain how service offers and requests can be described and matched using DSD.