Semantic Web Services (SWSs) are specified in a semantic markup language to enable other services (and agents) to reason about their capabilities, in order to decide whether a SWS should be invoked or not. In this paper an environment for development and description of SWSs is presented. This environment, called ODE SWSDesigner, consists of a graphical interface, which allows users to carry out the design and characterization of SWSs at a conceptual level, and a set of software modules, which verify the design correctness and perform the translations from the graphical descriptions to the languages used to specify SWSs. ODE SWSDesigner provides support for a layer-based framework that we have proposed with the aim of enabling a language -independent development of SWSs. This framework is based on the use of problemsolving methods that are considered as highlevel specifications from which SWS descriptions can be generated and verified