A Conceptual Comparison of WSMO and OWL-S

Web Services have added a new level of functionality on top of current Web, enabling the use and combination of distributed functional components within and across company boundaries. The addition of semantic information to describe Web Services, in order to enable the automatic location, combination and use of distributed functionalities, is nowadays one of the most relevant research topics due to its potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective Enterprise Application Integration and eCommerce. In this context, two major initiatives aim to realize Semantic Web Services by providing appropriate description means that enable the effective exploitation of semantic annotations, namely: WSMO and OWL-S. In this paper, we conduct a conceptual comparison that identifies the overlaps and differences of both initiatives in order to evaluate their applicability in a real setting and their potential to become widely accepted standards.