Supporting dynamics in service descriptions - The key to automatic service usage

Abstract

In realistic settings, service descriptions will never be precise reflections of the services really offered. An online seller of notebooks, for instance, will most certainly not describe each and every notebook offered in his service description. This imprecision causes poor quality in discovery results. A matcher will be able to find potentially matching services but can give no guarantees that the concrete service needed will really be provided. To alleviate this problem, a contract agreement phase between service provider and requester following the discovery has been suggested in the literature. In this paper, we present an approach to the automation of this contracting. At the heart of our solution is the possibility to extend service descriptions with dynamically changing information and to provide several means tailored to the abilities of the service provider to obtain this information at discovery time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.