Thoughts on automatic discovery

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this list but I have been working with Semantic Web and Web
Services for some time now. I couldn't find much on the topic of automatic
discovery of web services in the archives, but I'll present my idea here in
hope that I can get some valueble feedback.

Ever since I first read about UDDI I always thought of it as "yellow pages"
for Web services. Though there is a need for this, I still lack the
possibility to describe a service for fully automatic discovery by other
services. I've been looking for a method for describing services that will
allow this ever since. The work on semantic web and web ontologies is, in my
opinion, to complex to be used for web services today (compared to SOAP and
WSDL for solving communication and integration of web services). My question
to You is; what are Your idea of a solution for describing services for
automatic discovery?

My latest work on the subject is to define a service as something that
consumes and produces artefacts. Each artefact can be related to an
ontology. If a web service needs a specific artefact as input, it can search
for those services that specifies this artefact as output. We would not need
a new XML format for defining this, we could simply use namespaces in the
WSDL-file describing the service that would point to the ontology defining
the specific artefact. This is my idea of a method for solving part of the
discovery-problem of web serviices. How well does this match your ideas and
is there any work on the subject that are related to this?

The result of my work will be part of my thesis this summer and I hope for
some valuable feedback.

regards,
Erik Hellman

Received on Sunday, 21 April 2002 10:11:54 UTC