Requirements for Service Description and Composition in Agentcities SDC WG Working Draft, August 19, 2002, sdc-wg@agentcities.org Authors: Stanislaw Ambroszkiewicz (chair) IPI PAN and II AP Dariusz Mikulowski and Leszek Rozwadowski II AP Tomasz Nowak IPI PAN Krzysztof Miodek IM UL Marek Kisiel-Dorohinicki, Jaroslaw Kozlak, and Krzysztof Cetnarowicz AGH Abstract. An alternative approach to service description and composition is presented. It is based on agent technology, and on the idea of separating description and composition language from binding, i.e., from specification of data format (exchanged by applications) and transport protocol. Usually, the binding is an integral part of description language, e.g., WSDL, and DAML-S. Starting with this idea, recomendations for construction of a simple service description language as well as for a composition protocol are presented. Agents play crucial role in our approach; they are responsible for service composition. Status of this document This is a draft of the document to be submitted to the Agentcities.NET as the out- put of the working group Service Description and Composition in Agentcities. Feedback and comments are welcome and may be sent to sdc-wg@agentcities.org Table of Contents 1. Introduction: What are Web services? 2. Overview of WSDL, DAML-S, and the Work of Web Services Activity of W3C 3. Our Approach to Service Description and Composition 4. General View of an Alternative Proposal of Description Language and Composition Protocol 5. Requirements for Universal Message Format 6. Requirements for the Format of Agent State and Service State 7. Requirements for Description Language 8. Requirements for Composition Protocol 9. Requirements for Abstract Architecture of Agent and Service 10. Requirements for Biding Layer (if any) 11. Usage Scenarios The work is done within the framework of KBN project No. 7 T11C 040 20