Researchers are beginning to realize the potential of web services that can use the web as a place for information publication and access as opposed to the traditional webservices paradigm that merely uses the web as a transport medium. Traditional web services can be difficult to discover, can have complex invocation APIs, and require strong coupling between communicating applications. In previous work, we presented ontology-based techniques in which users make service requests using free-form, naturallanguage- like specifications. This paper shows how we can use these ontological techniques to automatically create ontology-based web services that (1) are easy for software agents to discover because they are created based on machine-processable formalisms (ontologies), (2) have invocation APIs requiring only simple read and write operations, and (3) require no a priori agreements regarding types and data formats between communicating applications. Experiments with our prototype implementation in several domains show that our approach can effectively create web services with these characteristics.