Feta: A light-weight architecture for user oriented semantic service discovery

Abstract

Semantic Web Services offer the possibility of highly flexible web service architectures, where new services can be quickly discovered, orchestrated and composed into workflows. Most existing work has, however, focused on complex service descriptions for automated composition. In this paper, we describe the requirements from the bioinformatics domain which demand technically simpler descriptions, involving the user community at all levels. We describe our data model and lightweight semantic discovery architecture. We explain how this fits in the larger architecture of the myGrid project, which overall enables interoperability and composition across, disparate, autonomous, third-party services. Our contention is that such light-weight service discovery provides a good fit for user requirements of bioinformatics and possibly other domains. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.