Application developers often do not have control over the services they utilize. What would happen if a service required by an application were removed from the environment or had its interface changed? What if a new and better service were introduced that an application might be able to utilize? Existing services-oriented frameworks do not protect application developers against these contingencies.

The OWL Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) is a language to describe the properties and capabilities of Web Services in such a way that the descriptions can be interpreted by a computer system in an automated manner. This technical note presents the results of applying the model problem approach to examine the feasibility of using OWL-S to allow applications to automatically discover, compose, and invoke services in a dynamic services-oriented environment.