A Proposal for a Semantic Web Service Description Format

Automatic evaluation and consumption of Web services requires a comprehensive semantic information model of a Web service. One example of a language that facilitates capability-driven description of services is OWL-S. However, it imposes two limitations: (1) it offers no native support for the description of certain rule types often needed for service description and (2) it leads to very large service description documents that are difficult to read and write. In this paper, we propose an XML-based markup format that addresses these problems and allows for semantic annotation of Web services of different technical flavors. This work is inspired by OWL-S, however it makes certain design decisions aimed to increase the ease of use of semantic Web service descriptions, by presenting a significantly more compact syntax for service markup and grounding. Furthermore, the proposed description format provides support for non-deterministic service operations.