Towards Universal Web Service Clients

In this paper we propose the Web Service Description Framework (WSDF), a suite of tools for the semantic annotation and invocation of side effect free Web Services. WSDF bases on established standards from both the Web Services and the Semantic Web communities. We developed a software package on top of Apache AXIS and a relational database server that allows an application to invoke a service without any prior knowledge. The sole prerequisite is a shared ontology defining major domain concepts.