The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards for the semantic Web. Those standards are aimed at laying the foundation for future systems. Web ontology language for the semantic Web (OWL-S) provides standards aimed at facilitating the advertisement, discovery, and invocation of semantic Web services. This paper takes the OWL-S standard for a spin, by building a system based on it.

The first half of the paper provides an excellent introduction to semantic Web services. The authors present an overview of OWL-S, and then detail the problems with the discovery and execution of semantic Web services. They describe a prototype system, which they developed and implemented. This system discovers and executes semantic Web services associated with the tasks of locating and booking hotel rooms. The second half of the paper describes and discusses several shortcomings of OWL-S, as discovered during the implementation of the system.

This paper will be of interest to readers who would like to obtain a solid introduction to semantic Web services that is rooted in a real-world example. It will also be of interest to developers who wish to avoid some thorny problems discovered by the authors.