OWL-S for Describing Artifacts

Artifacts for Multi-Agent Systems have been defined as runtime entities providing some kind of function or service that agents can fruitfully exploit to achieve their individual or social goals. In order to enable agents to autonomously discover the available services, select the proper artifact(s), and use the services they need, it is necessary to describe the services offered by artifacts in terms of (i) what each service does, (ii) how to access it, and (iii) how it works. In this paper we explore how OWL-S (OntologyWeb Language for Services), a language specifically aimed for the description of Web Services, can be exploited also for describing the services offered by artifacts. In particular, we investigate how to represent the artifact features by means of OWL-S, provide an example, and discuss some preliminary results in terms of advantages and limitations of this approach.