Abstract

An important objective of the Semantic Web is to make Electronic Commerce interactions more flexible and automated. To achieve this, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper we investigate how Semantic and Web Services technologies can be used to support service advertisement and discovery in ecommerce. In particular, we describe the design and implementation of a service matchmaking prototype which uses a DAML-S based ontology and a Description Logic reasoner to compare ontology based service descriptions. By representing the semantics of service descriptions, the matchmaker enables the behaviour of an intelligent agent to approach more closely that of a human user trying to locate suitable web services. We also present the results of initial experiments testing the performance of this prototype implementation in a realistic agent based e-commerce scenario.

Citations