Trading without Explicit Ontologies

Classical approaches to traders in middleware rely on a common language of server, clients, and traders to understand each other. In these systems, pre-defined ontologies play a crucial role. But when dealing with large-scale, open systems such ontologies are no longer available. To cope with this problem, we have developed a radically different approach to trading. Rather than relying 100% on a trader, we assume that traders provide only rough matches and that clients need to make intelligent choices to find a more suited service. To this end, we introduce the notion of trust, which evolves with the client’s experience. We implement a simulation of this trust-based trading system and run several test scenarios investigating the use of history and dynamic trust to discover the more suited services. Our analysis and simulation indicate that intelligent clients and rough traders may considerably extend the scope of trading towards large-scale, open distributed systems.