Christian Facciorusso

A Web Services Matchmaking Engine for Web Services

This paper concentrates on the issue of matchmaking in the context of web services. It provides a brief review of the difference between directory services and matchmaking facilities and explains why directories such as UDDI are important but insufficient for web services and need to be complemented with advanced matchmaking facilities. It discusses the requirements that web services place on matchmaking, namely symmetry of information exchange, the ability of each party to specify requirements of the other party, rich languages to describe services and their consumers as well as their demands, and the ability to dynamically update and configure what is being offered. These requirements are addressed by the Web Services Matchmaking Engine (WSME) – a powerful matchmaking engine capable of matching complex entities, and a Data Dictionary Tool for defining the language of the corresponding matchmaking process. The WSME matchmaking process and property and rules languages are described. An example of how a dynamic market for selling and buying Capacitors can be created with WSME is given. Finally, conclusions and possible future avenues of work are presented.

The Typed Domain - a Recipe for Creating Virtual Enterprises

This paper presents an approach for describing inter-organisational relationships, based on the concept of the typed domain, which helps establish and enact successful relationships between partner organisations in specific domains. The typed domain consists of the relationship life cycle, projections and their documents, and domain building blocks of different granularity from which the relationship can be described, established and built. The relationships among the projections and the mappings among their various documents and related agreements can be exploited to structure and simplify the negotiation between partners. Furthermore, the mappings can be used to translate an agreement reached in one projection to agreements in other projections. This can be achieved using the typed domain as the context for the transformations and where necessary, involving further negotiation cycles.

Strong and flexible domain typing for dynamic e-business

This work introduces the concept of the typed domain, as an aid to the establishment and enactment of successful service consumer-provider relationships. The typed domain consists of the relationship life cycle, projections and their documents, and domain building blocks of different granularity from which the relationship can be described, established and built. It is based on the idea of a relationship type, containing the necessary information from which the relationship life cycle can be supported and from which negotiation, configuration, enactment and termination directives can be generated. We show how the information from the business projections can help determine the type of relationship that is desired. The typed domain can also serve as the framework and context in which an agreement reached in one projection can be translated into agreements in other projections - where necessary, involving further negotiation cycles and input from the two related parties. The paper provides two examples of how relationship types can be used: selection from exhaustive monolithic types versus dynamic assembly from finer granularity type building-blocks.

Distribution issues in the design and implementation of a virtual market place

This paper describes an investigation into the distribution issues surrounding the design and implementation of virtual market places. The paper starts by describing the requirements customers and service providers have from a virtual market place. It is then shown how the requirements deemed most important can be addressed by exploiting the inherent distribution of certain aspects, and by distributing other aspects of such market places. In particular, the paper concentrates on the structuring of the information space describing the services and products, and its distribution between the providers and the market place mediator. Primarily, this supports the implementation of phased dialogues between the customer and the providers, while at the same time addressing the providers’ desire to protect business sensitive processes and information. Distributing the dialogue in time allows customers and providers to interact more flexibly and to gradually build understanding and trust between them, before divulging any business or personally sensitive information to each other.

Design Criteria for a Virtual Market Place (ViMP)

This paper considers the requirements customers and providers have from a virtual insurance market place, and proposes a set of desirable features to satisfy them. A design implementing these features is proposed, based on a logical structuring of the information needed to support the dialogue between providers and customers. The applicability of this design for market places trading products other than insurance is discussed, and further research to consider the particular features of business services is suggested.

Advanced dynamic property evaluation for CORBA-based electronic markets

Match-making in virtual markets and trading in distributed systems are similar activities, aiming at evaluating a client constraint against a set of available service offers, described in terms of properties. Virtual market systems, however need elaborate schemes for keeping certain property values dynamically updated. Dynamic property updates can be supported by using the dynamic property concept of the CORBA trading service. Specifying, executing and managing the algorithms used to compute the values of the dynamic properties, however, is outside the scope of the related CORBA standard. This paper presents the concept and the implementation of a generic engine which can be used to create, edit, manage and execute dynamic property evaluation algorithms. This approach brings about a number of benefits: an improved development environment, a simulation test-bed, improved management and maintenance capability, and a structured way of linking the trading service to legacy systems. The resulting system has been used extensively as part of the ViMP (Virtual MarketPlace) set of development tools to create a number of dynamic virtual markets.