Lightweight Semantic Web Service Descriptions

Abstract

The Web standardization consortium W3C has developed a lightweight bottom-up specification, Semantic Annotation for WSDL (SAWSDL), for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. In this chapter, we describe SAWSDL, and then we present WSMO-Lite and MicroWSMO, two related lightweight approaches to Semantic Web Service description, evolved from the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) framework. WSMO-Lite defines an ontology for service semantics, used directly in SAWSDL to annotate WSDL-based services. MicroWSMO and its basis, hRESTS, are microformats that supplement WSDL and SAWSDL for unstructured HTML descriptions of services, providing WSMO-Lite support for the growing numbers of RESTful services.