Dr Hongen Lu, School of Information Technology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, VIC 3125, AUSTRALIA . helu@deakin.edu.au
Ontology, Agent, Middle Agent, Service Matchmaking
Web services is one of the main forces driving the Internet from its infant, a vast collection of text and images, to today's huge growing marketplace of service providers and consumers. Agent technology plays an important role in this evolution. One of the fundamental problems in building open Web-based applications is how to find information providers and how to integrate information agents in such a dynamic environment. There is an obvious need for a standardized, meaningful communication among agents to enable them to know each other and perform collaborative task execution. In this paper, I propose an ontology based language for agent services description. This language exploits ontology of service domain, and provides the flexibility for developers to plug in a suitable language to describe the constraints. Multiple matchmaking strategies based on agent service ontology are given to help agents finding appropriate service providers. The series of strategies consider various features of service providers, the nature of requirements, and more importantly the relationships among services.
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