Describing Web Services for User-Oriented Retrieval

As of 2005, there are over 1000 publicly available Web Ser- vices in the Life Sciences community and this number continues to grow. Describing them so that users can retrieve the service required to per- form a given task is now a key problem in managing these services. This paper outlines some of the requirements and challenges for semantically describing Web Services for user-oriented retrieval in the Life Sciences domain. We briefly discuss the OWL-S, WSMO and my Grid ontologies and their suitability to tackling this problem.