Combining query and preference - an approach to fully automatize dynamic service binding

Web services will only have advantages over existing technologies if the service binding can be performed dynamically. However, existing service description languages do not contain enough information for a computer agent to do the selection automatically during runtime on behalf of the user. This results from the fact that in most approaches the offer description language doubles as a re-guest language, which prevents the requestor from a precise formulation of requests and preferences. Therefore, in this paper, we emphasize the need for a distinguished service request language that allows to capture all of the requestor´s preferences. We present a concrete technique to represent such preference-containing requests, which is based on fuzzy object sets.