In an open environment populated by heterogeneous information ser- vices integration will be a major challenge. Even if the problem is similar to planning in some aspects, the number and the difference in specificity of ser- vices makes existing techniques not suitable and requires a different approach. Our solution is to incrementally solve integration problems by using an interplay between service discovery and integration alongside with a technique for com- posing specific partially matching services into more generic constructs. In this paper we present a directory system and a number of mechanisms designed to support incremental integration algorithms with partial matches for large num- bers of service descriptions. We also report experiments on randomly generated composition problems that show that using partial matches can decrease the fail- ure rate of the integration algorithm using only complete matches by up to 7t imes with no increase in the number of directory accesses required. 1
['Ion Constantinescu', 'Walter Binder', 'Boi Faltings']
Directory Services for Incremental Service Integration