Abstract. In this work, we present novel techniques for flexible and reliable execution and deployment of Web services which can be integrated into existing service platforms. The first technique, dynamic service selection, provides a layer of abstraction for service invocation offering Web services the possibility of selecting and invoking Web services at runtime based on a technical specification of the desired service. The selection can be influenced by using different types of constraints. The second technique, a generic dispatcher service capable of automatic service replication, augments Web services with load balancing and high availability features, without having to consider these features at the services ’ development. We implemented these techniques within the ServiceGlobe system, an open Web service platform. 1

Web services are fast emerging as the dominant means for connecting remotely executing programs via well established internet protocols and commonly used machine readable representations. Software agents are now increasingly used in commercial applications to solve complex engineering problems, and these applications often expose or make use of Web services. As such,

Web services are applications that communicate over open protocols such as HTTP using structured forms of XML such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP [17]) or Remote Procedure Calls for XML (XML-RPC [18]). There have been e#orts to standardize a number of things: the Web Service Description Language (WSDL [5]) is a standard for describing web services' syntax, and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol (UDDI [1]) is often used as a discovery mechanism for dynamically finding new services. However, there have been few e#orts to describe the interactions between clients and services. In this paper, a system is discussed and analyzed for using the Resource Description Framework (RDF [13]), the Java Expert Systems Shell (JESS), and the Web Ontology Language (OWL [15]) to augment web service clients. The clients can collect, report, and analyze data about their experiences with the quality of service (QoS) of web services, and are able to parse and use this information to dynamically select the best service for their needs.

There is little doubt that Web services are becoming a part of the essential fabric enabling machine-to-machine information exchange across the Web. However, there is also a perceptible progression toward the realisation that this principal means of invoking operations on remote hosts will become insufficient to their task almost as quickly as they rose to prominence. Already emerging amongst the community of adopters is a recognition that richer semantics are required to express any truly useful information about the nature of business processes and the way in which they interoperate. But ultimately, as the power to meaningfully express information improves, so does the need for automatic processes (i.e. agents), that are capable of interpreting, processing and deciding about this information. Given this, a means of connecting the realms of agents and Web services is required and so this paper reports on a proposed design for a Service Integration Gateway for seamlessly connecting Web services to agents and their services. The Gateway is a progressive work evolving from existing approaches, yet taking an innovative approach encapsulating fully transparent and automatic operation in a simple and scalable solution.

This paper reports on a technology enabling bidirectional semantic interoperability between FIPA compliant agents and Web services, using OWL-S as a common service description language. This is an an extension of previously reported work consisting of a gateway for WSDL encoded Web service descriptions. This paper reports on the enhanced model, a semantic integration gateway, its architecture and operation. We discuss how the Gateway allows agents and Web clients to invoke both atomic services and composition patterns consisting of both agent services and Web services represented as unified workflow patterns. This is achieved by using OWL-S to express the service descriptions of both agent and Web services, with JADE agents engineered to facilitate the service composition process.

Abstract –Technological advancements in the Web services standards have lead to the development and deployment of broad applications in open and dynamic environment. These standards enable the services to be discovered and invoked dynamically. In current web, due to lack of semantics, agents cannot understand services that radically influence the negotiation, coordination and cooperation among the heterogeneous environments. Hence semantics play a vital role to bring automation in the current web and are highly desirable to enhance the capabilities of Web services. We believe that the vision of the semantic web can be realized if the agents are intelligent enough to process and interpret the semantic content based on the understanding which they have developed about the contents through the use of attached ontologies, since the agents have well defined reasoning, decision making, and interaction mechanisms. Our research objective is to propose new paradigm for interactions among semantic web services and software agents for problem solving. In this paper, our focus is to address the issue of negotiation between agents and semantic web services and present our initial work towards the solution, by presenting how the agents can discover, invoke and negotiate with the Semantic Web services for the autonomous service provisioning and consumption. We have achieved this interoperability, where the agents can efficiently communicate with the Web services in the dynamic and heterogeneous environments.

The process-based semantic composition of Web Services is gaining a considerable momentum as an approach for the effective integration of distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous applications. To compose Web Services semantically, we need an ontology. There are several ways of inserting semantics in Web Services. One of them consists of using description languages like OWL-S. In this paper, we introduce our work which consists in the proposition of a new model and the use of semantic matching technology for semantic and dynamic composition of ebXML business processes.

This paper is an exhaustive review summarizing the results, observations and findings of the renowned researchers in the domain of Web Service Discovery. After extensive scavenging on the Internet, we felt that there is a paucity of good quality survey papers, which can help, provide directions to a researcher looking for a fertile area to explore in the Web Services arena, especially in Discovery of Web Services. We highlight here the list of problems, which need to be looked into and investigated. This comprehensive listing of the open-ended unresolved issues is presented in a novel way, by providing its Cause-Effect Analysis. In this paper, we hand-hold you to into a literary journey that provides a glimpse of the huge spectrum of work investigated by researchers globally in the field of Discovering the Right Services, based on the Requirements provided by the Consumer.