Simplifying the Web Service Discovery Process

One of the crucial reasons for adding semantic descriptions to Web services is to enable intelligent discovery, removing the need for a human to manually search and browse textual descriptions in repositories of services, like UDDI or ebXML. The Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) provides a conceptual model within which the function of a Web service can be described in terms of formalized preand postconditions over the information space and assumptions and effects related to the real world; however WSMO is very flexible in the way in which the Semantic Web Service developer can use these elements to describe the functionality of a service. Thus a number of approaches for effectively describing the offered function of a Web service and the requirements of users, along with methods to compare them have surfaced in the last number of years, leaving developers unsure of which approach to use and if it is possible to combine them. In this paper we introduce a framework within which these different approaches can be combined and present some new tools that can be used with this framework by the Semantic Web Service developer.