Defining attribute templates for descriptions of distributed services

Service discovery is one key aspect in the enabling technologies for service-oriented system architecture. Current distributed technologies such as CORBA and Web services define a communication protocol for advertising and discovering services but less attention has been paid to service descriptions themselves. The paper proposes attribute-based templates for describing service descriptions. The templates are a compilation of the results from an empirical study on descriptions of software components advertised on the Internet and the attributes listed by related literature. Although the templates should not be considered complete, they act as a common guideline to assist service providers with the specification of their services, and can be adopted by implementations of description repositories. By having a common guideline, services are described in a more uniform way and client enterprises will also have a more consistent view of service descriptions and a more extensive set of information that is useful for service selection.