Specifying Web Service Agreement with OWL

Quality of Service (QoS) is necessary for service-oriented computing. Web Services Agreement (WSA) aims at defining a language and a protocol for advertising the capabilities of providers, creating agreements based on offers providers, and monitoring of QoS. On the other hand, semantic web provides many techniques that enable services intelligent and automatic on web. Therefore, we intend to integrate semantic web techniques with WSA management to show its advantages. In this paper, we present some works for this initial study. We illustrate how to specify WSA with ontology language instead of XML schema. Some semantic web based methods to express WSA elements are proposed, such as using OWL class expression to capture the "Terms" statement semantic, introducing rules-based method to represent service level description, and defining ontology for QoS metric. An agent-based runtime framework for WSA management is also presented to support our approach.