Towards a Semantically Enhanced Component Trader Architecture

Component-oriented software seems promising in providing the dynamism and flexibility necessary to realize the Virtual Enterprise (VE) model for business organisations. According to the VE model, and from the perspective of componentoriented programming, a virtual enterprise system could be constructed by marshalling the necessary services through composition of available components selected from a collection provided by the participating enterprise systems to form the new virtual enterprise system. One of the central issues for component software is the location of components. In large-scale open systems trading is already used as a service location mechanism. This is considered the only way to manage services where complete knowledge of the system is both unreasonable and unrealistic. Providing trading mechanisms appropriate for component development requires a move from appearance based (interface) to behavior based (semantic) trading. We present a semantically enhanced component trader architecture that enables this move, which builds on ideas from component location in software reuse and conceptual structures from knowledge engineering.