WSML - a Language Framework for Semantic Web Services

Abstract

The Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) provides a framework of different language variants to describe semantic Web services. This paper presents the design rationale and relation with existing language recommendations. WSML is a frame based language with an intuitive human readable syntax and XML and RDF exchange syntaxes, as well as a mapping to OWL. It provides different variants, allowing for open and closed world modeling; it is a fully-fledged ontology and rule language with defined variants grounded in well known formalisms, namely Datalog, Description Logic and Frame Logic. Taking the key aspects of WSML as a starting point, we rationalize the design decisions which we consider relevant in designing a proper layering of ontology and rule languages for the Semantic Web and semantic Web services.