Enabling Web Services Composition with Software Agents
Mihhail Matskin, Peep Küngas, Jinghai Rao, Sobah Abbas Petersen · 2005
Recent progress in the field of Web services has made it practically possible to publish, locate, and invoke applications across the Web. The ability for efficient selection and integration of inter-organizational and heterogeneous services on the Web at runtime is an important requirement to the Web Service provision. In particular, if no single Web Service can satisfy the functionality required by a user, there should be a possibility to combine existing services together in order to fulfill the request. This trend has triggered a considerable number of research efforts on Web services composition both in academia and in industry. Another trend in modern Web services provision is related to making Web services pro-active. This means that services can be engaged into complex conversations instead of just their simple invocation and response with some result or an error. In this paper we describe our solution for pro-active Web services selection and composition. In particular, we consider a logic-based method for services composition and marketplace-based system architecture supporting agent communication, negotiation and semantical reasoning in the composition process.