Searching for Services on the Semantic Web using Process Ontologies," presented at The First Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS-1

Abstract. The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will become increasingly more important to provide tools that allow people (and software) to quickly find the services they need, while minimizing the burden for those who wish to list their services with these search engines. This can be viewed as a critical enabler of the ‘friction-free ’ markets of the ‘new economy’. Current service retrieval technology is, however, seriously deficient in this regard. The information retrieval community has focused on the retrieval of documents, not services per se, and has as a result emphasized keyword-based approaches. Those approaches achieve fairly high recall but low precision. The software agents and distributed computing communities have developed simple ‘frame-based ’ approaches for ‘matchmaking ’ between tasks and on-line services increasing precision at the substantial cost of requiring all services to be modeled as frames and only supporting perfect matches. This paper proposes