A Service Intermediary Agent Framework for Web Service Integration

Because web services and agent technology can help each other, to integrate them together is becoming a trend. Most of current research works focus on developing an integration framework to provide gateways that can connect the agent and web service worlds. In the paper, the service intermediary agent is proposed as a value-added professional service provider, which can manage a group of inherently related Web services. It organizes Web services as a set of plans and reacts to the requests by selecting and executing the appropriate plans. In order to process the incoming requests intelligently, the semantic goal structure is employed to facilitate plan organizing and plan selecting. The structure of the service intermediary agent and its working process are given. The semantic goal structure together with the deliberation process is given. The case study and experiments are also provided.