Multi-Agent Systems for Semantic Web Services Composition

Abstract

The vision which is making its way in information technology is to encapsulate organizations’ functionalities within appropriate interfaces and advertise them as one or more Web services, which could be integrated, when brought into play, in workflows. This innovative idea brings with it new outstanding opportunities but also new great issues, related mainly to the ability to automatically discover and compose Web services. Several researchers belonging to the agent community are convinced that this technical area is a natural environment in which the agent technology features can be leveraged to obtain significant advantages. This chapter is aimed at briefly recalling the major results achieved by agent community and showing how their exploitation in the area of service-orientation systems could be very promising.