Service matching in agent systems

Issue Title: Special Issue: Agent-based Grid Computing The problem of service and resource matching is being actively discussed currently as a new challenging task for the next generation of semantic discovery approaches for Web services and Web agents. A significant advantage is expected when using an ontological approach to semantically describe and query services. A matchmaking problem arises when a service is being queried and it includes the distance measure between the required service description and the one from the service registry. We realized the need to analyze the applicability of different matchmaking methods to agent development tools when implemented according to agent technology specifications such as FIPA. We consider three main groups of cases: matchmaking between classes of service profiles in pure taxonomies, matchmaking between classes in faceted taxonomies, and matchmaking between instances of faceted taxonomies.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]