The underlying goal of the development of semantic representations for Web Services is to provide increased explicit representations of meaning in Web Services applications.

One challenging area where this might be applied is in the message exchanged between Web Services - in other words, semantic definitions of the meanings of data / commands exchanged in the execution of a Web Services based application. While current approaches such as OWL-S tackle these elements in service groundings by mapping processes to functioncalls with specific arguments, Agent Communication Languages could provide a potentially richer alternative.

To help explore this the examples on this web page were designed to show how an existing Agent Communication Language (FIPA-ACL, FIPA-SL and associated standards developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) could be mapped into representations which could be readily used in a Web Services environment. Included are:

• OWL ontologies for FIPA-ACL, FIPA-SL languages as well as First Order Logic (FOL)
• Definitions of WDSL profile in order to send these messages over SOAP transport.
• Related descriptions in a short paper (see below)

Motivations and some comments on design choices can be found in the following brief paper:

• "Adapting Agent Communication Languages for Web Service to Web Service Communication"
• UPC technical Report (number to appear here shortly).
• [PDF]

The resulting definitions have been tested using a prototype implementation based on the JENA and AXIS toolkits. The ontologies are based on an earlier set of DAML ontologies produced by the authors in the context of the ATOMIK language toolkit.

The objective of the work is to encourage discussion on the topic and comments are very welcome to any of the authors.