Towards Ontology-Based Yellow Page Services Mikko Laukkanen TeliaSonera Finland P.O. Box 970 (Teollisuuskatu 13), FIN-00051 SONERA mikko.laukkanen@teliasonera.com Kim Viljanen, Mikko Apiola, Petri Lindgren, and Eero Hyv¨ onen Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), University of Helsinki P.O. Box 26 (Teollisuuskatu 23), 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland firstname.lastname@cs.helsinki.fi Abstract This paper discusses the possibilities of the Semantic Web technologies in both annotating services and deliver- ing relevant services to end-users. We propose an ontology- based mechanism for both advertising and finding the ser- vices. The essential parts of the system are ontologies for describing and storing service advertisements, a semantic service finder for the end-user, and a semantic service an- notation editor for service providers. 1 Introduction Yellow page directory services 1 on the Web are a widely used business concept for helping people to find companies providing services and selling products. Despite of the ver- satility of possibilities, it can still be difficult for the end- user to map a need to the services offered [1, 2, 3]. On the other hand, for the service provider, it may be difficult to index the service in such a way that the end-users would not miss the service. The problems with yellow page ser- vices arise in situations, where the end-user is not able to precisely state what kind of service would serve her needs. The work presented in this paper represents the ongoing work of IWebS (Intelligent Web Services) project 2 , which studies the possibilities of the Semantic Web [4] and Web Services [5] technologies in both annotating the services and delivering the relevant services to the end-users. We propose an ontology-based mechanism for both advertising and finding the services. The idea is to let the various ac- tors in the IWebS system—in this case the end-users and 1 e.g., http://www.yell.co.uk 2 http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/iwebs/ Annotation Editor Service Finder Service Provider End-user Web services IWebS Knowledge base Figure 1. The general architecture of the IWebS system the service providers—to use the terms and concepts that they are familiar with. These concepts are then mapped to the ontologies within the system. The general architecture of the IWebS system is depicted in Figure 1. The essential parts of the system are ontologies for describing and stor- ing the service advertisements (the IWebS knowledge base), a semantic service finder for matching the services for the end-user, and a semantic service annotation editor for the service providers. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we give some background information to the problem area of map- ping the end-user’s need to a service. Section 3 describes a scenario for motivating the need for the IWebS system. In Section 4 we discuss how the end-users search and find services using the IWebS system. Section 5 describes the ontologies used within the IWebS system, and explains the means for annotating new services. In Section 6 we ad- dress issues that are not covered in the current version of the IWebS system. Finally, Section 7 concludes this paper.