As the set of available Web Services expands, it becomes increasingly important to have automated tools to help identify services that match a requester's requirements. Finding suitable Web services depends on the facilities available for service providers to describe the capabilities of their services and for service requesters to describe their requirements in an unambiguous and ideally, machine-interpretable form. Adding semantics to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web services is essential for achieving this unambiguity and
Introduction
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) specifies a way to describe the abstract functionalities of a service and concretely how and where to invoke it. The WSDL 2.0 specification does not include semantics in the description of Web services. Therefore, two services can have similar descriptions while meaning totally different things. Resolving this ambiguity in Web services descriptions is an important step toward automating the discovery and composition of Web services — a key productivity enabler in many domains including
Abstract
This document defines a set of extension attributes for the Web Services Description Language and XML Schema definition language that allows description of additional semantics of WSDL components. The specification defines how semantic annotation is accomplished using references to semantic models, e.g. ontologies. Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) does not specify a language for representing the semantic models. Instead it provides mechanisms by which concepts from the semantic models, typically defined outside the WSDL