A Comparative Evaluation of Web Services Description Approaches

Web services Description has been recognized as an interesting paradigm that attracted significant attention from the research community. Currently, several WS description approaches have been presented to complete a detailed description with all the required aspects. The WSDL standard remains incomplete to provide a sufficiently rich description to service consumers. Thus, WSDL extensions as SAWSDL and WS-Policy have been proposed to offer a wider coverage of various WSs description aspects. Meanwhile, OWL-S and WSMO provide general representational frameworks for semantic Web Services. In this paper, we systematically compare WSMO, OWL-S and WSDL 2.0 enriched by SAWSDL and WS-Policy extentions, in the context of four aspects namely the functional, non-functional, technical and the data model aspects to better illustrate the strengths and the weaknesses of each of these approaches.