A conceptual comparison between WSMO and OWL-S

Abstract

Web Services have added a new level of functionality on top of the cur-rent Web, enabling the use and combination of distributed functional components within and across company boundaries. The addition of semantic information to describe Web Services, in order to enable the automatic location, combination and use of distributed components, is nowadays one of the most relevant research topics due to its potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective Enterprise Application Integration and eCommerce. In this context, two major initiatives aim to realise Semantic Web Services by providing appropriate description means that enable the effective exploitation of semantic annotations with respect to discovery, composition, execution and interoperability of Web Services, namely: WSMO and OWL-S. In this deliverable, we conduct a comparison that identifies the overlap and differences be-tween both initiatives in order to evaluate their applicability in a real world setting and their potential to become widely accepted standards. A preliminary version of this deliverable has been presented at the Eu-ropean Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2004), Erfurt, Germany, September 27-30, 2004