With a growing number of available services, each having slightly different parameters, preconditions and effects, automated planning on general semantic services become highly relevant. However, most exiting planners only consider PDDL, or if they claim to use OWL-S, they usually translate it to PDDL, losing much of the semantics on the way.
 In this paper, we propose a new domain-independent heuristic based on a semantic distance that can be used by generic planning algorithms such as A* for automated planning of semantic services described with OWL-S. For the heuristic to include more relevant information we calculate the heuristic at runtime. Using this heuristic, we are able to produce better results (fewer expanded states) in less time than with established techniques.
Describing a semantic heuristics which builds upon an OWL-S service description and uses word and sentence distance measures to evaluate the usefulness of services for a given goal. 