Experiences Building a Standards-Based Service Description Repository

Approaches to Web service composition are dependent upon some form of repository to hold service descriptions. Most service composition software relies upon highly-optimized and proprietary formats for representing service descriptions and storing them into a repository. Unlike these approaches, this paper reports on the development and evolution of a standards-based service description repository. The evolutionary aspect of the described service description repository is of interest as it provides insight into the rapidly changing landscape of semantic technologies and tools; from topic maps to triple-spaces. The work described in this paper is contextualized against the backdrop of the Web services challenge an annual software competition which fosters research in the realm of Web service discovery and composition.