Enriching ebXML registries with OWL ontologies for efficient service discovery

Abstract

Web services, like their real life counterparts have several properties and thus truly useful semantic information can only be defined through standard ontology languages. Semantic Web is an important initiative in this respect. However, although service registries are the major mechanisms to discover services, the semantic support provided by service registries is completely detached from the semantic Web effort. In this paper, we address how ebXML registries can be enriched through OWL ontologies to describe Web service semantics. We describe how the various constructs of OWL can be mapped to ebXML classification hierarchies and show how the stored semantics can be queried through standardized queries by using the ebXML query facility. We also provide our observations on how ebXML registries can be extended to provide more efficient semantic support.