Composing Web Services Using an Agent Factory

Abstract

Web service composition can provide a value-chain between customers and suppliers. The increasing number of services, and thus possible combinations, demands the development of dynamic and automatic techniques for their composition. Current commercial solutions are limited and are primarily static and manual. Automation requires reasoning about (semantic descriptions of) the services. In this paper we describe our initial work involving the semantic description of Web services using DAML-S and how our Agent Factory has used these descriptions in its design process to derive a Web service configuration.

Dynamic Service Reconfiguration and Enactment Using an Open Matching Architecture

“…The template description describes the functionality, behaviour and structure of the template, and dependencies between the slots. A simple extension (Richards et al, 2004;Sabou et al, 2003) has been defined to specify templates in OWL-S, as illustrated in Figure 2. Every template has an OWL-S Profile, describing what this combination of slots would do, if used and refined.…”

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“…Moreover, system's capability improves greatly when systems (represented by agents) cooperate. Therefore, applying the MAS technique in WS has been a focus of WS research, such as service discovery, selection, and orchestration (Buhler & Vidal, 2003;Maamar et al, 2005;Richards et al, 2003;Sycara et al, 2001). However, agents correspond to a broader concept with respect to services.…”

Designing creative artificial systems

“…The resulting agents, however, may evolve in ways their designers could never have anticipated: their abilities can change substantially. This agent factory approach is also used in a different domain, namely web services: needs of Internet end-users form web service requirements that lead to configurations of web services (Richards et al, 2003).…”