Automated discovery, interaction and composition of Semantic Web services

In this paper, we introduce a vision for Semantic Web services which combines the growing Web services architecture and the Semantic Web and we will propose DAML-S as a prototypical example of an ontology for describing Semantic Web services. Furthermore, we show that DAML-S is not just an abstract description, but it can be efficiently implemented to support capability matching and to manage interaction between Web services. Specifically, we will describe the implementation of the DAML-S/UDDI Matchmaker that expands on UDDI by providing semantic capability matching, and we will present the DAML-S Virtual Machine that uses the DAML-S Process Model to manage the interaction with Web service. We will also show that the use of DAML-S does not produce a performance penalty during the normal operation of Web services. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.