The World Wide Web is changing. While once conceived of and implemented as a collection of static pages for browsing, it now promises to become a web of services — a dynamic aggregate of interactive, automated, and intelligent services that interoperate via the Internet. Multiple web services will interoperate to perform tasks, provide information, transact business, and generally take action for users, dynamically and on demand. Such prospects are especially important for the e-business community, providing opportunities for conducting business faster, more efficiently, and with greater ease than ever before. For instance, the opportunity to manage supply chains dynamically, to achieve market advantage, is expected to increase productivity and add value to products. On the other hand, automatic management of supply chains presents new challenges.

One of the problems posed by the web of services model is the need for a service to match service requestors with service providers, especially when — as in real web-life conditions — services are undiscovered, new, and/or coming and going on a rapid basis.

To these ends, we have developed our Semantic Matchmaker, an entity that will allow web services to locate other services, provide a solution to the problem of matching, and allow for full implementation of interoperative service providers on the web. Here we introduce DAML-S, a DAML-based language for describing service capabilities. We show how semantic matching between advertisements and requests is performed.