Describing capabilities of Internet data sources for information discovery and sharing

The Internet now makes it possible for people to build complex applications by combining the data and processes offered by different information systems that are available across the network. These data sources normally have very diverse data structures and processing capabilities. In order for these systems to share information and to collaborate with each other, they must be able to present their information and capabilities in such a way that they can be understood by other data sources. In this paper, we investigate issues concerning data source description in terms of their contents and processing capabilities. We argue that the current research results in advertising data sources have limitations, and we propose a framework to overcome these limitations. We demonstrate that our approach allows data sources to advertise their capabilities in both a general and a specific way.