Publishing Semantic Descriptions of Services

Service discovery in large scale, open distributed systems is difficult because of the need to filter out services suitable to the task at hand from a potentially huge pool of possibilities. Semantic descriptions have been advocated as the key to expressive service discovery, but the most commonly used service descriptions and registry protocols do not support such descriptions in a general manner. In this paper, we present an approach and implementation for service registration and discovery that uses an RDF triple store to express semantic service descriptions and other task/user-specific metadata, using a mechanism for attaching structured and unstructured metadata. The result is an extremely flexible service registry that can be the basis of a sophisticated semantically-enhanced service discovery engine, an essential component of a Semantic Grid.