System support for knowledge-based trading in open service markets

Abstract

An open distributed service environment can be perceived as a service market where services are freely offered and requested. Any infrastructure which seeks to provide appropriate mechanisms for such an environment has to include some mediator functionality to bring together matching service requests and service offers. The matching algorithm that the mediator must perform commonly builds upon an IDL-based type definition for service specification. We propose a type specification notation based upon conceptual graphs that supports the openness of the service environment, since it is more flexible than IDL-based definitions, and since it is closer to the cognitive domain of application users. In our framework, the trader implements a matching algorithm as well as a learning algorithm which are tailored to service trading in open environments.