Agent-Mediated Knowledge Sharing for Services Management

For service-oriented architectures that span multiple businesses, organizations must transfer information back-and-forth about their available services. Because of the potential large volume, it is unreasonable and impractical to expect human practitioners to handle the number of interactions desired and/or required on a continual basis. Intelligent agents offer the adaptability and flexibility to handle the knowledge transfer that must occur in order to share web service offerings. Agents that operate in this domain will require specialized communication protocols that effectively transfer service-oriented information. This paper introduces an architecture and specialized communication procedures designed for this sort of knowledge sharing environment. We show that these procedures perform reasonably when evaluated using current agent communication technologies.