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Adaptive Middle Agent for Service Matching in the Semantic Web: A Quantitative ApproachTweetSpeaker: Xiaocheng Luan Start: Friday, September 17, 2004, 10:00AM Location: 346 ITE Abstract: With the advent of the Web services and the need for a Semantic Web, the
agent technology is (in my view) finally becoming a viable solution to
many real world problems. Effective service matching is key to the success
of agent systems, but existing service matching methods mostly consider
service descriptions as the only factor and many important issues have
been largely overlooked. In the real world applications, agents with
identical service descriptions may differ dramatically in performance
levels; an agent may have strong and weak areas in its service offerings;
and the distribution of services may provide helpful hints on which
matches are more likely to be better than the others. Moreover, an agent's
capability may change over time. These are very important issues and if
left unaddressed, may become real problems in the real world applications.
In our approach presented in this dissertation, the middle agent
establishes and refines an agent's capability model based on the domain
ontology and through the interactions with the agents. In this framework,
an agent's performance history is considered as an integral part of the
agent's capability model and the agent's strong and weak areas can also be
revealed. Moreover, the dynamically captured and updated service
distribution in the service domain is considered as an important factor in
service matching. Service matching here is carried out in two steps. In
the first step, candidates are selected through the semantic service
description matching. In the second step, the performance rating of each
candidate with respect to the specific request is estimated based on the
agent's capability model, and the candidates with the highest estimated
performance ratings will be selected.
The major advantages over existing methods are the establishment and
refinement of an agent's capability model and the use of such a model in
service matching. A prototype system and an evaluation framework have been
implemented to evaluate the ideas discussed in this work. The statistics
collected from the experiment shows a significant improvement over typical
service matching methods in terms of the accuracy in selecting the best
service provider(s) for each request. Tags: dissertation defense Host: Yun Peng Assertions:
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