Modeling QoS characteristics in WSMO

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are becoming widespread solutions for realizing distributed applications. They promote a service view of the world in which functionalities exposed as services by different companies are assembled and reused in a standardized manner. Services are the core building blocks of SOAs and therefore modeling various aspects of services becomes a fundamental challenge. Among these aspects, quality-of-service (QoS) need to be addressed given the high dynamism of any SOA-based system. This paper introduces the basic steps of modeling QoS characteristics of services with the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) in order to provide a QoS-aware SOA. It discusses the current limitations of modeling QoS characteristics with WSMO and proposes a set of approaches towards a richer QoS modeling support. Each approach is analyzed in terms of complexity and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are discussed.