Symbolic Agent Negotiation for Semantic Web Service Exploitation

This paper presents an architecture and a methodology for agent-based Web service discovery and composition. We assume that Web services are described with declarative specifications like DAML-S. Based on the declarative information about services, symbolic reasoning can be applied while searching for or composing automatically new services. We propose that symbolic agent negotiation could be used for dynamic Web service discovery and composition. Symbolic negotiation, as we consider it here, is a mixture of distributed planning and information exchange. Therefore, by using symbolic negotiation for automated service composition, we support information collection and integration during service composition. The latter aspect has been largely neglected in automated service composition until now.