There’s lots of talk about service descriptions these days, most notably around Tim Bray’s WSDL discussions (which includes SMEX-D), Norm Walsh’s NSDL for WITW, and the DAWG’s Saddle, to be a part of the SPARQL protocol. Phew, acronym overload…

Also in that space is OWL-S, an OWL-based Web service ontology that Danny Ayers has looked at. I though it would be fitting to describe semantic web services with RDF, so I tried it out but ended up feeling quite like Norm after his WSDL endeavour.

I did however manage to get something working, OWL-S Maker, which only uses a subset (and possibly in a wrong way), but is self-powered through its own service description, a PHP class (which currently has too many local dependencies to be worth anything to anyone but myself), and some XSLT. The descriptions could use some more work regarding the “typing” of inputs, but I thank Saddle may eventually provide some insights there. As for the general modelling of services, input, and output, I think I may have to look elsewhere — OWL-S seems too complicated.

As a usage example, see the Sparqlette service description input and the description of nearestAirport for a partially handcrafted example with two profiles.