Web services competition
Tim Finin forwarded a link to this competition to the FIPA chat list. There are two parts to the competition: Part A is about choosing a service to invoke, based on some required input and output messages, and given a collection of WSDL service descriptions. I don’t know all the details, and sample problems are not yet available, but it sounds like some fairly straightforward XML crunching and therefore rather uninteresting. Part B sounds a little more interesting: again given input and output messages, the requirement is to construct a web-service composition that gets as close as possible to the desired service. Since the only service descriptions are WSDL, it seems complex reasoning about the services themselves is not required. So, it could be that a simple A* solution is all that’s needed, which would be a shame.
Something to revisit when the details of the sample problems are available.