Digital licensing service for agents and web services
R. Jena, C.W. Thompson · 2006
If agent systems are to scale, many individuals and organizations across the Web will own agents and/or may want to rent, lease and otherwise license the capabilities of agents or groups of agents. This paper focuses on identifying a collection of services that are aimed at automating the digital licensing of agent-based services. The digital licensing service is itself a composite service consisting of a collection of subservices. A negotiation service results in a contract between two parties. The terms and conditions of the contract are monitored by a digital rights management service. A compensation service handles payment. An electronic receipt service handles compensation bookkeeping. Other more traditional services are assumed, including a discovery service, a binding service, a workflow service, and security services. Since we represent our agent and service interfaces using Web service description language and also our digital licensing services, our scheme is being developed to be upwards compatible with Web services.