Bringing Semantics to Web Services with OWL-S

TLDR

Current Web Service standards ensure interoperability but lack automation support, and semantic Web techniques, exemplified by OWL‑S, augment these standards by providing ontology‑based service specifications. OWL‑S comprises a profile ontology describing service functionality, a process ontology and presentation syntax for usage, and a grounding ontology for interaction, enabling automated discovery, interoperation, and composition. These specifications allow software to interpret unfamiliar services and employ them to meet user goals, and a rich ecosystem of open‑source tools now supports development, reasoning, and dynamic utilization of Web Services.

Abstract

Current industry standards for describing Web Services focus on ensuring interoperability across diverse platforms, but do not provide a good foundation for automating the use of Web Services. Representational techniques being developed for the Semantic Web can be used to augment these standards. The resulting Web Service specifications enable the development of software programs that can interpret descriptions of unfamiliar Web Services and then employ those services to satisfy user goals. OWL-S ("OWL for Services") is a set of notations for expressing such specifications, based on the Semantic Web ontology language OWL. It consists of three interrelated parts: a profile ontology, used to describe what the service does; a process ontology and corresponding presentation syntax, used to describe how the service is used; and a grounding ontology, used to describe how to interact with the service. OWL-S can be used to automate a variety of service-related activities involving service discovery, interoperation, and composition. A large body of research on OWL-S has led to the creation of many open-source tools for developing, reasoning about, and dynamically utilizing Web Services.