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ABSTRACT

This paper uses the term "service" for a service instance, and the term "agent" for an agent who provides or consumes a service. We consider real-life or business services (e.g., business process out-sourcing, software development service involving human experts). We distinguish business from computational (e.g., Web or grid) services based on the fact that business services lack the typical input-output structure of computational services. For example, one can model a temperature service as one that takes a zipcode as input and produces the current temperature as output. By contrast, it would not help to model a software development service as one that takes a "business problem" as input and produces a suite of "software modules" as output. First, it is clearly beyond the scope of current practice to create formal classes or a type system of business problems and software modules. Second, business services are not invoked but are engaged, and would rarely take single-shot inputs and produce single-shot outputs. Third, business service providers would offer a continuum of expertise along which they can provide effective services. For example, a provider who is good at payroll management may also be able to provide retirement plan management, in contrast with the temperature service example above, which has no other function. Fourth, the selection of business services relies on the agents' evaluation of previous engagements.

REFERENCES

• 1: M. N. Huhns, U. Mukhopadhyay, L. M. Stephens, and R. D. Bonnell. DAI for document retrieval: The MINDS project. In M. N. Huhns, editor, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, pages 249--283. Pitman/Morgan Kaufmann, London, 1987.
• 2: C. A. Knoblock, Y. Arens, and C.-N. Hsu. Cooperating agents for information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, pages 122--133, 1994.
• 3: Gerard Salton , Michael J. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1986

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.0 General

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Theory

Keywords:
matching, service selection, vectors