An approach for service description and a flexible way to discover services in distributed systems

In an earlier context, we have developed and implemented tools which constitute a trader based on ontologies and knowledge representation in order to discover a service based on its static properties (like its location, its provider name, etc). In this paper, we extend these tools by addressing the dynamic properties of a service (its behavior) and its interface (parameters, methods, etc). These three levels provide a complete vision about the service description. They can be used by clients to query and discover services. The association of an ontology and knowledge representation provide a powerful combination that we will examine in the document. This development is compatible with the trader interface as defined by ODP and CORBA. We show an example to demonstrate the flexibility of our trader. We also present our approach for adapting services to the needs of different users. We define for each user a profile. These profiles will be taken into account in the searching tools defined in our trader to filter the service queries and to provide to the client its appropriate services.