for the W 3 C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services 1 Web Service Semantics - WSDL - S

Enterprise application integration and business process management are critical to most organizations today. In the context of Service Oriented Architecture, this translates into the technical challenges of discovery, reuse and composition of services. In implementing service oriented architectures, Web Services are becoming an important technological component. However, Web Service Description Language [WSDL] standard does not contain the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services – a requirement for addressing the vexing heterogeneity challenges that need to be addressed for achieving (semi) automated discovery, improved reuse and faster composition. While efforts by the Semantic Web community to address this issue have resulted in proposals such as WSMF [FB02], OWL-S [OWL-S] and WSMO [WSMO], they are seen as revolutionary and do not build on current WSDL standards, thereby making industry adoption less likely, since industry prefers evolutionary approaches whenever available. We believe and demonstrate that any approach to annotating Web Services should and could be built by enriching the current Web Services standards with semantic descriptions. In particular, we summarize an approach to annotating Web Services [AFM+05] which builds on current standards while allowing for the use of multiple semantic representation languages to annotate services.