An Ontology-Based Architecture for Service Discovery

The ability to match user´s goals with service offers is the key to service discovery. In this paper we present an ontology-based architecture for service discovery. In our architecture, ontologies are used to give machine-understandable descriptions, and there is a central discovery platform acting as a mediator for requesters and providers. Service offers are described by abstract services, general services and concrete services. The description of concrete services can be generated timely by component-level Web services. By exploiting the semantic descriptions of the service offers, the discovery platform is able to discover the required service, which can be single or composed of multiple services.