DIANE: an integrated approach to automated service discovery, matchmaking and composition

Automated matching of semantic service descriptions is the key to automatic service discovery and binding. But when trying to find a match for a certain request it may often happen, that the request cannot be serviced by a single offer but could be handled by combining existing offers. In this case automatic service composition is needed. Although automatic composition is an active field of research it is mainly viewed as a planning problem and treated separatedly from service discovery. In this paper we argue that an integrated approach to the problem is better than seperating these issues as is usually done. We propose an approach that integrates service composition into service discovery and matchmaking to match service requests that ask for multiple connected effects, discuss general issues involved in describing and matching such services and present an efficient algorithm implementing our ideas.