Using queries for semantic-based service utilization

A vision of the Semantic Web is to facilitate global software interoperability. Many approaches and specifications are available that work towards realization of this vision: Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide a good level of abstraction for interoperability; Web Services provide programmatic interfaces for application to application communication in SOA; there are ontologies that can be used for machine-readable description of service semantics. What is still missing is a standard for constructing semantically formulated service requests that solely rely on shared domain ontologies without depending on programmatic or even semantically described interfaces. Such a standard would facilitate the realization of Semantic RPC as the whole process from issuing such a request, matchmaking with semantic profiles of available and accessible services, deriving input parameters for the matched service(s), calling the service(s), getting the results, and mapping back the results onto an appropriate response to the original request. The standard must avoid realization-specific assumptions so that frameworks supporting semantic RPC can be built for bridging the gap between the semantically formulated service requests and matched programmatic interfaces. This paper introduces a candidate solution to this problem by outlining a query language for semantic service utilization based on an extension of the OWL-S ontology for service description