Semantic Web Service Offer Discovery

Semantic Web Services are a research effort to automate the usage of Web services, a necessary component for the Semantic Web. Traditionally, Web service discovery depends on detailed formal semantic descriptions of available services. Since a complete detailed service description is not always feasible, the client software cannot select the best service offer for a given user goal only by using the static service descriptions. Therefore the client needs to interact automatically with the discovered Web services to find information about the available concrete offers, after which it can select the best offer that will fulfill the user’s goal. This paper shows when and why complete semantic description is unfeasible, it defines the role and position of offer discovery, and it suggests how it can be implemented and evaluated.