a use for a web ontology language

One thing that I would like to have a web ontology language useful for is
to access electronic services by characteristics, not tokens.

The above is a strange way of stating what I want, but I'm trying to
differentiate the requirement from two different requirements.

On the lower end, I don't want a language that can just look up services by
atomic tokens, even if they are arranged in a taxonomy and even if there is
typing information about the inputs and outputs of the service.  This task
can be handled by the current proposals (UDDI, etc.).

On the upper end, although I would eventually want such a language, I don't
want the ontology language to include a full formalism for how a service
works.  The ontology language is there to allow characteristics of the
service to be represented, e.g., this is a travel service that accepts
foreign money transfers, not details of the how the service is effected.

The sort of thing that one might want to find out using the ontology
language is whether there is a service that can find

	travel services that produce anonymous flight tickets with payment
	made in the form of overseas bank transfers


Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2001 09:34:33 UTC