Service Discovery in the Future Electronic Market

The trend that electronic markets are taking, aided by the concommitant development of mobile devices suggest a major change from the way electronic commerce is done today. The increased use of PDAs, laptops has showed us a new horizon of proliferation in the electronic market. When e-commerce services and transaction processing facilities need to be accessed from a wireless device,new and challenging research problems come into the picture. Discovering services dynamically will become increasingly important in the mobile e­commerce scenario. In the near future, a service would be selected automatically for a job, taking into consideration its physical location, context re­ lated and other semantic information. To support such a picture, the existing discovery mechanisms need to move beyond trivial attribute or interface matching. They would be much more knowledge based. In this paper, we present a summary of the existing service discovery protocols and the work that we have done in the service discovery area in our quest to make service discovery more dynamic.