The service-oriented computing paradigm has gained more and more attention in research and practice over the last couple ofyears. Today, the idea of composing services in a loosely and flexible way in order to support the rapid and low-costdevelopment of applications has been widely accepted. Along with the increasing success of the service-oriented computingparadigm came a variety of languages, which aim at documenting service properties in order to support the selection andbinding of services. Amongst them are approaches like the Web Service Description Language or the Web OntologyLanguage for services. However, until today no approach was able to establish itself as a sufficient standard for a completedescription of all relevant service properties. In this paper, we aim at classifying current web service description languages toidentify the different properties that a service description language can cover. We furthermore debate on the characteristics ofthe analyzed approaches and highlight areas where further research is required
