Managing semantic metadata for Web/Grid services

Web/Grid services' metadata and semantics are becoming increasing important for service sharing and effective reuse. In this paper we present a generic framework for engineering and managing services' Semantic Metadata (SMD) with the ultimate purpose of facilitating interoperability, automation, and knowledgeable reuse of services for problem solving. The framework addresses fundamental issues, approaches, and tools for the whole lifecycle of SMD management, in other words, those of acquiring, modeling, representing, publishing, and reusing services' SMD. It adopts ontologies and the Semantic Web technologies as the enabling technologies by which services' metadata are semantically enriched and made interoperable, understandable, and accessible on the Web/Grid for both humans and machines. In particular mechanisms are proposed to make use of service SMD for service discovery and composition. The paper also describes a service SMD management system in the context of the UK e-Science project GEODISE. A suite of tools are developed, which forms the core of the SMD management infrastructure. We demonstrate the added value of the use of SMD through the integration of SMD management with GEODISE application systems.