Practical Experience in Building an Agent System for Semantics-Based Provision and Selection of Grid Services

We present our practical experience in implementing an agent-based system for provision and selection of Grid services. The agents form a marketplace where services are offered and searched. Agents communicate semantic information about services using the Web service ontology (OWL-S). We describe our implementation that is built on Globus Toolkit 3 and utilizes the JADE agent framework and an off-the-shelf OWL-S toolkit. This combination of technologies can be used for more sophisticated agent-based services, such as e.g. automatic composition of services. We illustrate and evaluate our framework using a simple example, yet without loosing generality. We present preliminary evaluation results leaving stronger evaluation to future work. Our evaluation captures the relative costs of different stages during service provision and selection that allows detecting potential bottlenecks.