Partner and service discovery for collaboration establishment with semantic Web services

The ultimate goal of the semantic Web is to enable automated collaboration over the Internet, based on ontologies as semantic terminology definitions and Web services as computational facilities accessible over the Web. An essential functionality for collaboration support on the semantic Web is detection of entities, services, and other resources that are to be used for achieving a successful collaboration. This is commonly referred to as discovery, wherefore the emerging concept of semantic Web services promises more effective support than conventional Web service technologies: based on exhaustive semantic description frameworks, intelligent mechanisms are envisioned for discovery, composition, and contracting of Web services. This paper outlines an approach for automated collaboration support using semantic Web services, and presents the realization of semantically driven discovery of cooperation partners and usable Web services as a main component for collaboration establishment.