Review of Web services description approaches

Abstract

The WS (Web services) description is an important step in the services consumption's cycle. Semantic WS extends the capabilities of a WS by associating semantic concepts in order to enable better search, discovery, selection, composition and integration. Several WS description approaches have been proposed to present a detailed description exceeding the limitations of the syntactic standard WSDL. Our analysis of these works leads us to group them into two classes: Annotations Based Description Approaches and Semantic Language Based Approaches. In this paper, we provide a comparative evaluation of these approaches based on a set of criteria that can be qualified as performance indicators. The identified comparison criteria are the following: ontology dependence, service description adaptation, expressiveness and the capacity of the description.