Rule-Based Approach for a Better B2B Discovery
IGI Global eBooks · 2010
This chapter improves the exchange model proposed in Aklouf and Drias (2008). This model has three levels; the authors focus on the discovery level and how organizations find each other more efficiently through the use of a Web service directory like UDDI. The discovery approach that this chapter depicts strengthens the partner discovery process. With the evolution of organizations’ Web services and their widespread use, searching for them based on what they provide has become a real challenge. A functionality-based Web service discovery mechanism is then necessary since the functionalities are the most important thing partners look for. This chapter presents an approach that targets the discovery of organizations’ Web services according to what they provide to other organizations that might become potential partners using a functionality-based model. The proposed model attempts to express without ambiguity the functionalities of the organization’s Web services operations by using an ontology. Moreover, the proposed approach exploits expert systems that aim at adding new business functionalities to Web services according to their rule-base defined by the organization knowledge engineer or the system administrator. The authors have also added a semantic layer between the ontology and the expert systems to make them more ontology-aware. A JAVA implementation has been done to validate the authors’ proposal.