ASON: An OWL-S based ontology for astrophysical services

Modern astrophysics heavily relies on Web services to expose most of the data coming from many different instruments and researches worldwide. The virtual observatory (VO) has been designed to allow scientists to locate, retrieve and analyze useful information among those heterogeneous data. The use of ontologies has been studied in the VO context for astrophysical concerns like object types or astrophysical services subjects. On the operative point of view, ontological description of astrophysical services for interoperability and querying still has to be considered. In this paper, we design a global ontology (Astrophysical Services ONtology, ASON) based on web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) to enhance existing astrophysical services description. By expressing together VO specific and non-VO specific services design, it will improve the automation of services queries and allow automatic composition of heterogeneous astrophysical services.