1. An integrative approach for attaching semantic annotations to service descriptions Luc Moreau, L.Moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk University of Southampton,UK

2. Overview Motivation Existing technologies and limitations Metadata attachment The Southampton Service Directory Conclusion

3. Overview Motivation Existing technologies and limitations Metadata attachment The Southampton Service Directory Conclusion

4. Service Discovery Service discovery is a difficult task in large scale, open distributed systems such as the Grid and Web, due to the potentially large number of services advertised. In order to filter out the most suitable services, many have advocated the use of semantic descriptions of services in a manner that is amenable to automatic processing [Berners-Lee, Hendler, Lassila 2001, damls- iswc02]

5. Semantic Discovery Semantic discovery is the process of discovering services capable of inter- operability, even though the languages or structures with which they are described may be different. Typically, a semantic discovery process relies on semantic annotations, containing high- level abstract descriptions of service requirements and behaviour. Our work focuses on the means to register and discover such semantic annotations.

6. Metadata (for the provider) An essential element in semantic discovery is to allow users to augment service descriptions with additional information, i.e. metadata. Providers may adopt various ways of describing their services, access polices, contract negotiation details etc.

7. Metadata (for the consumer) Resource consumers can also impose their own selection policies on the services they prefer to utilise: provenance, derived quality service, reputation metrics etc. We want a system that allows multiple users (not just publishers) to add metadata to service descriptions.

8. Metadata about what? It is useful to add metadata to: Service descriptions, and Any other concept that may influence the discovery process, e.g. supported operations, types of arguments, businesses, users.

9. Structured vs. unstructured Metadata may be structured according to published ontologies, so that it can be interpreted unambiguously by multiple users, especially in the case of a public registry. Alternatively, metadata may also be raw and unstructured, in the case of a personal registry used by a single user.

10. Overview Motivation Existing technologies and limitations Metadata Attachment The Southampton Service Directory Conclusion

11. Service is being hosted as a Web Service Integration with Manchester’s semantic processing engine How to support other APIs (Grid MDS or OGSA compatibility) Next our focus will be on management policies

12. myGrid in Southampton Michael Luck, David DeRoure Keith Decker, Terry Payne Simon Miles, Juri Papay, John Dickman, Claudia di Napoli, Richard Lawley, Ananth Krishna, Victor Tan Thanks to other myGrid colleagues

13. www.mygrid.org.uk m