Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web is an exciting vision for the evolution of the World Wide Web. Adding semantics enables structured information to be interpreted unambiguously. Precise interpretation is a necessary prerequisite for automatic Web search, discovery, and use. Services are a particularly important component of the Semantic Web. A semantic service description language can enable a qualitative advance in the quality and quantity of e-commerce transactions on the Web. The OWL Services Coalition, under the guise of OWL-S, has taken some important first steps in this direction.

The model of actions, processes, and events developed within the NTL project provides a natural, distributed operational semantics that may be used for simulation, validation, verification, automated composition and enactment of OWL-S-described Web services.