May the Ontologies Be with You! Towards a User-Friendly Web-Based Editor for Semantic Web Service Description

Ontologies as a means for semantic description of web services have been discussed for many years. Various formal languages and correspoding tools using ontologies for describing web services have also been proposed (i.e. OWL-S). However, these existing approaches mainly are targeting domain experts creating ontologies. They are often too complex to be used by an average service provider offering web services online. But for offering and retrieving web services from future electronic marketplaces or service registries, a semantic service description is necessary. Therefore, in this paper an approach for an easy-to-use web-based editor for describing web services using ontologies based on the OWL-S language is proposed and evaluated. It not only supports a semantic, but also a commercial description of the web service offered, while remaining compatible with previous approaches addressing such holistic web service descriptions.