Hewlett-Packard Laboratories A Semantic Web Services Architecture The Semantic Web Services Initiative Architecture (SWSA) committee has

created a set of architectural and protocol abstractions as a foundation for Semantic Web service technologies.This article summarizes the committee’s findings, emphasizing its review of requirements gathered from several different environments.The authors also identify the scope and potential requirements for a Semantic Web services architecture. Formed in February 2003, the Seman-tic Web Services Initiative Architec-ture (SWSA) committee’s mission is to develop the necessary abstractions for an architecture that supports Semantic Web services. The resultant framework builds on the W3C Web Services Archi-tecture working group report (and is motivated in part by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the Semantic Web1). Other groups developing Semantic Web services frameworks contributed to our discus-sions, including the OWL-S //au: please spell out/ / consortium, the WSMO //au: please spell out/ / group at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), and the METEOR-S //au: please spell out// group at the University of Georgia.2,3 In this article, we describe the proto-cols exchanged between the interacting entities or agents that interpret and rea-son with semantic descriptions in the deployment of Semantic Web services. We focus specifically on those capabili-ties that extend the potential range of Web services; we also discuss security, reliability, and a flexible means of recov-ery from the problems that can occur in open and evolving environments. The SWSA architectural framework attempts to address five classes of Semantic Web agent requirements — dynamic service discovery, service engagement, service process enactment and management, community support services, and quality of service (QoS) — which we cover in detail here as well