Light-weight semantic service annotations through tagging

Abstract

Discovering and composing services is a core functionality of a service-oriented software system. Semantic web services promise to support and (partially) automate these tasks. But creating semantic service specifications is a difficult, time-consuming, and error prone task which is typically performed by service engineers. In this paper, we present a community-based approach to the creation of semantic service specifications. Inspired by concepts from emergent semantics and folksonomies, we introduce semantic service specifications with restricted expressiveness. Instead of capturing service functionality through preconditions and effects, services are tagged with categories. An example illustrates the pragmatic nature of our approach in comparison to existing approaches. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.