OWL-S Technology for Representing Constraints and Capabilities of Web Services

Description of constraints and capabilities of Web services is crucial to enable flexible service discovery, interaction and management. Constraints and capabilities are at the heart of representing policies that govern the behavior of Web services. Because policies regulate the behavior of different parties they are effective if and only if they are unambiguously understood by all the parties that they regulate. To achieve this level of common understanding policies should be expressed in terms of shared ontologies that are based on a logic shared by every party. For this reason, we believe that the starting point of any activity on expressing policies, capabilities and constraints should take into account the work that has been developed in the context of Semantic Web services, and specifically OWL-S.