WebTrader: Agent Discovery
- If grid applications are to be assembled when needed, the parts must be found somewhere and probably not all will come from the local environment.
- How can we find building block resources (e.g., agents, services, channels, components, data sources) when we need them?
- Today, traders (matchmakers) are used for this purpose but these traders generally know only about closed worlds of resources of limited types (e.g., IDL).
- Anyone on the Web can advertise a resource (e.g., agent, service, data source) that anyone else can discover.
- Advertised resources can be located at runtime to dynamically extend the knowledge and/or capabilities of the client, as well as enable intelligent on-the-fly assembly and reconfiguration of distributed systems.
- WebTrader is a matchmaking service that locates XML-based advertisements for resources embedded in web pages indexed by industrial-strength search engines.
- WebTrader supports type-specific matcher algorithms, trader federation, and can access multiple search engines.