The need for translation during the dynamic invocation of services described on the semantic web is not addressed merely by introducing middle agents to translate messages. When an agent is attempting to utilize a service discovered and described on the Semantic Web using a service language like OWL-S, it must be able to translate descriptions of required inputs, given in terms from the ontolog...

The web services paradigm, which finds roots in Service-Oriented Computing [1, 12], promises to enable rich, flexible, and dynamic interoperation of highly distributed and heterogeneous web-hosted services. Substantial progress has already been made towards this goal (e.g., emerging standards such as SOAP, WSDL, BPEL) and industrial technology (e.g., IBM’s WebSphere Toolkit, Sun’s Open Net Envi...

The need for translation during the dynamic invocation of services described on the semantic web is not addressed merely by introducing middle agents to translate messages. When an agent is attempting to utilize a service discovered and described on the Semantic Web using a service language like OWL-S, it must be able to translate descriptions of required inputs, given in terms from the ontolog...

In this short position paper we briefly describe our recent and on-going work on Colombo, a framework in which web services are characterized in terms of (i) the atomic processes (i.e., operations) they can perform; (ii) their impact on the “real world” (modeled as a relational database); (iii) their transition-based behavior; and (iv) the messages they can send and receive (from/to other web s...