The classification and selection of services within distributed, heterogeneous environments is a non trivial task. For a proper selection and composition of services in such environments -- for example in a Grid or Cloud -- it is required to dispose of detailed information about the existing resources and their characteristics. Particularly for applying appropriate optimization strategies these metadata are indispensable in order to decide which is the actual best resource for a given task, respectively query. It is thus a crucial task to first identify, classify and describe all system components and their attributes in a common language. Therefore a generic, high-level model of a service ontology is proposed, that exposes the fundamental building blocks of a distributed, service-oriented environment, by providing a structured collection of components and their functional and non-functional attributes. Finally, the applicability of the proposed ontology is verified by applying it to two distinct application scenarios, one from the domain of Distributed Database Management Systems, and one from a High-Energy Physics experiment.

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