Acquisition and management of semantic web service descriptions

The increasing importance and use of Web services have resulted in a number of efforts targeted at automating Web service discovery and composition based on semantic descriptions of their properties. However, the progress in the automation of Web service discovery is still held back by the fact that the description of Web services in terms of semantic metadata is still mainly manually. This Ph.D. thesis addresses this problem by developing an approach for the acquisition and management of semantic Web service descriptions in order to facilitate efficient service discovery and composition. Specifically, this involves the collection of information about a Web service, the acquisition of semantic descriptions based on the collected information, and the structured storage of the generated semantic descriptions.