Semantic software engineering approaches for automatic service lookup and integration

Using Web services today has two major drawbacks. Firstly, a programmer has to guess the appropriate service operations by interpreting syntactic operation names as provided by WSDL descriptions. Secondly, the decision which service to use is fixed at design time. Using ontological descriptions, we automate the lookup of services. The lookup occurs at runtime, supporting location aware selection and the choice of more relevant or alternate services. We use semantic Web techniques such as DAML+OIL to avoid the exact match between service invocations and make both service lookup and invocation independent of the strict syntactic Web service description.