Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities

The Web is moving from being a collection of pages toward a collection of services that interoperate through the Internet. The first step toward this interoperation is the location of other services that can help toward the solution of a problem. In this paper we claim that location of web services should be based on the semantic match between a declarative description of the service being sought, and a description of the service being offered. Furthermore, we claim that this match is outside the representation capabilities of registries such as UDDI and languages such as WSDL. We propose a solution based on DAML-S, a DAML-based language for service description, and we show how service capabilities are presented in the Profile section of a DAML-S description and how a semantic match between advertisements and requests is performed.