Simon Field

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.

Web services and matchmaking

This paper discusses the need for detailed and comprehensive information models for web services that go a long way beyond currently available models. In this context, the need for this information creates several requirements of the matchmaking facilities needed to find matching business partners. The paper discusses these requirements and provides an assessment of some existing directory and matchmaking facilities. Finally, a working system that addresses these needs is presented.

Introduction: Theory and Application of Electronic Market Design

Markets play a central role in the economy, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and payments. Recent years have seen an enormous increase in the role of information technology in markets, in particular the emergence of electronic marketplaces. Different matching mechanisms are appropriate in different situations and there is not a single solution that caters for all the various negotiation situations. Therefore, economists, game theorists, and computer scientists have started to take a direct role by designing various kinds of negotiation mechanisms for computer products, travel, insurance, and utilities such as power and gas. What is so special about “electronic” market design is the fact that a designer has many more possibilities to design a negotiation mechanism than one would have for physical markets. The design of electronic markets involves a number of disciplines including game theory, mechanism design theory, simulation and laboratory experimentation. The focus of this special issue is to provide an overview of several new approaches in the field, and we are pleased to bring you an exciting selection of high standing papers. This article is intended to provide a brief introduction to this new and dynamic field.

TRANSFORMING AGREEMENTS INTO CONTRACTS

During the life cycle of a service consumer-provider relationship, agreements are reached in a variety of areas covering technical, service, business and legal issues. Although some of these agreements may be viewed as legally binding, it is unlikely that any of them will constitute a legal contract in the full sense of the word. It is often expedient to gather these agreements and create a legal contract out of them. Automating this process of contract generation can speed up the process and reduce the cost of legal expenses. In fact, the process of automated contract generation can also be useful outside the realm of web services, when agreements are made directly among people. We propose a way of transforming such agreements into contracts in a dynamic, efficient and speedy manner, using advanced forms of matchmaking technology in a novel way. This complements the other directions in which the agreements are to be used, namely configuration, instantiation, enactment supervision and relationship termination and evaluation.

In Search of the Right Partner

Finding matching customers and providers is an essential part of any dynamic e-business or virtual enterprise solution, Existing standards such as the CORBA Trading Service or emerging standards such as UDDI fall short of what is needed if the promise of dynamic e-business is to be fulfilled. This paper explores what is needed, and presents an implementation that satisfies those requirements.

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.