What Can It Do?

Knoogle is a tool for constructing brokers. It needs three inputs:

1. Somewhere to find services. Given a task (query), Knoogle will search the specified (UDDI-compliant) repositories for services.

2. A way to compute the similarity between the task (query) and a capability (service). Given a web service (or services) that computes the similarity, Knoogle applies it to each task/capability pair in each repository and saves the results.

3. A criterion for choosing the "best" service according to the similarity metric(s). Given a selection policy, Knoogle applies it to the results above and identifies the best service to invoke.

If Knoogle is provided with all three of the above inputs, it can be used directly as a broker. However, it is primarily intended as a broker constructor, where some, or all, of the above inputs are fixed at construction time. The user can then send a query to the constructed broker and receive either the details of a relevant service, or can have the service is invoked on their behalf.

Broker constructors can specify more than one repository and more than one similarity service. Consequently, the selection criterion can combine the results of several similarity services in order to identify the best candidate.