Overview of theWeb Services Challenge (WSC): Discovery and Composition of SemanticWeb Services

The capabilities of organizations can be openly exposed, easily searched and discovered, and made readily-accessible to humans and particularly to machines, using service-oriented computing approaches. Artificial intelligence and software engineering researchers alike are tantalized by the promise of ubiquitously discovering and incorporating services into their own business processes (i.e.composition and orchestration). With growing acceptance of service-oriented computing, an emerging area of research is the investigation of technologies that will enable the Discovery and Composition of Web Services. The Web Services Challenge (WSC) is a forum where academic and industry researchers can share experiences of developing tools that automate the integration of Web Services. Participating Software platforms address several new composition challenges. Requests and results are transmitted within SOAP messages, semantics represented as ontologies written in OWL, services are represented in WSDL, and service orchestrations are represented in WSBPEL. In addition, non-functional properties (Quality of Service) of a service are represented using WSLA format.