Title: An active blackboard for service discovery, composition and execution

Authors: George Lepouras, Costas Vassilakis, Anya Sotiropoulou, Dimitris Theotokis, Akrivi Katifori

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Terma Karaiskaki, Tripoli, 22100, Greece. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Terma Karaiskaki, Tripoli, 22100, Greece. ' 2nd Corfu EPAL, Pagkrateika, Corfu, 49100, Greece. ' Department of Informatics, Ionio Panepistimio, Tsirigoti Sq. 7, Corfu, 49100, Greece. ' Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, Panepistimiopolis 15784, Ilisia, Athens, Greece

Abstract: Organisations are turning to customer-centric electronic services, oriented to servicing customers| life-events. This development requires methods for automatically locating and synthesising individual services to compose complex ones that will service the customer|s life-events, since manual composition, either at the customer or the organisation side, incurs functional, economic and technical problems. In this paper we present an active blackboard architecture, which automates the task of service composition based on the semantics of individual services and data dependencies between them. The blackboard incorporates registries, which facilitate service discovery and an execution engine that arranges for dynamic service composition and execution.

Keywords: e-government; electronic services; e-services; service composition; blackboard architecture; semantics; ontologies; electronic governance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEG.2008.020450

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2008 Vol.1 No.3, pp.275 - 295

Published online: 27 Sep 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article