Integrating Preferences into Service Requests to Automate Service Usage?

Today, web services are often used as a technology to integrate functionality of different entities. However, one important potential of service oriented computing is not exploited: the ability to form agile networks. Here, service requestors and service providers are not fixedly tied together, rather, bindings to inefficient or unavailable service providers are transparently replaced by bindings to more appropriate providers at runtime. In such an architecture, the robustness and efficiency would be increased dramatically. The main reason why these networks are not a reality today is that current technologies do not allow for automatic service selection and invocation; rather, they require human interaction to decide on an appropriate service provider. Obviously, this approach is not feasible in a system where service selection needs to be carried out repeatedly at run time. The most challenging prerequisite for automatic service description is an appropriate service description language. This language needs to be able to capture service offers and requests in sufficient detail to allow for automatic matchmaking. In this paper, we argue that such a language needs to explicitly incorporate user preferences into service requests.