A Broker for OWL-S Web services

Brokers are widely used in distributed information systems such as Multi-agent systems and distributed databases. Yet, there has not been a detailed analysis of Brokers’ architecture and no general solution has been proposed on how the Brokers’ tasks have to be accomplished. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of these tasks, and an implementation based on OWL-S. We show that while OWL-S is adequate to provide all the information that is needed by the Broker, the straightforward implementation of the Broker using OWL-S results in a paradoxical situation. We solve this paradox by extending the Process Modeling language of OWL-S. Finally, we propose a solution to a number of issues that arise in the brokered management of the interaction between Web services such as the abstraction from queries to capabilities required to solve that query, and management of the knowledge required by the Broker to control the multi-party interaction.