An agency for semantic-based automatic discovery of web-services

With the evolution of Web service technology, services will not only become increasingly sophisticated, but also move into the area of business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer interactions. Because of todays wide variety of services offered to perform a specific task, there is a need for mediation infrastructures able to support humans or agents in the eventual selection of appropriate services. It is a common opinion that such issues should be solved adopting semantically rich unambiguous descriptions. Hence, ontologies should be used to describe services, to ease their discovery and selection. In order to perform such a selection, a matchmaking procedure, based on semantic descriptions similarity, is needed. Technologies developed for the Semantic Web based on theoretical studies on Artificial Intelligence, particularly on Description Logics, can help in this sense. As the Semantic Web is conceived as an extension of the current one, technologies developed explicitly for they both must be used synergically in order to provide a semantic layer to approaches such as UDDI registries, using OWL formatted descriptions. In this paper we present a framework for discovery of services, stored in an UDDI registry, which exposes a description whose semantic can be modeled using OWL-DL based formalism. In order to perform this task, methodologies to compute semantic differences between two descriptions and non-standard inference services have been investigated and exploited in an implemented system.