As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions
