Affiliations: Digital Enterprise Research Institute Innsbruck (DERI
Innsbruck), University of Innsbruck, Austria | Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway,
Ireland
Abstract: The potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective
marketplaces and eCommerce solutions has driven recent research efforts towards
so-called Semantic Web Services that are enriching Web services with
machine-processable semantics. To this end, the Web Service Modeling Ontology
(WSMO) provides the conceptual underpinning and a formal language for
semantically describing all relevant aspects of Web services in order to
facilitate the automatization of discovering, combining and invoking electronic
services over the Web. In this paper we describe the overall structure of WSMO by its four
main elements: ontologies, which provide the terminology used by other WSMO
elements, Web services, which provide access to services that, in turn, provide
some value in some domain, goals that represent user desires, and mediators,
which deal with interoperability problems between different WSMO elements.
Along with introducing the main elements of WSMO, we provide a logical language
for defining formal statements in WSMO together with some motivating examples
from practical use cases which shall demonstrate the benefits of Semantic Web
Services.
Keywords: Semantic Web Services, Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web services
