Composing Web Services using an Agent Factory

Web service composition can provide a value-chain between customers and suppliers. The increasing number of services, and thus possible combinations, demands the development of dynamic and automatic techniques for their composition. Current commercial solutions are limited and are primarily static and manual. Automation requires reasoning about (semantic descriptions of) the services. In this paper we describe our initial work involving the semantic description of Web services using DAML-S and how our Agent Factory has used these descriptions in its design process to derive a Web service configuration.