Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The fast evolution of the World Wide Web and the changes made in the economic world motivate companies to invest more and more in the e-business. In its simplest form, the e-business can be defined as the conduct of businesses on the Internet. It is a more generic term than e-commerce because it refers not only to buying and selling but also to servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. Companies use the Web to buy parts and supplies from other companies, to collaborate on sales promotions, and to do joint researches.
Since e-business became an economic cooperation activity, we can say that it has changed the rules of the market and the role of information technology (IT). The rapid growth of the technical and organizational needs creates several intelligent solutions for the e-business domain (Khubaib & Mansoor-uz-Zafar, 2008). The main perceived obstacle to e-business is the fewest number of methodologies that exist for the development of complete e-business projects. In order to ensure the effective establishment of e-business applications in a company, it must be developed and implemented from the business requirements and not from the technological viewpoint. Although, initial expectations of e-business growth were often overly optimistic, there is no doubt that commercial applications of Internet, Intranet, and related technologies have rapidly assumed an important position in the global economy. Although technology can play a very important role, it is a tool for obtaining results but never an aim in itself (Gregorio, Kassicieh, & De Gouvea Neto, 2005). The demands of e-business for rapid response and agile adaptation to the market-place require sharing knowledge among not only the intra-organizational staff but also among the partners and customers in new and more efficient ways. Furthermore, the cooperation between the business actors is more than necessary. Being confronted with the needs related specifically to the concepts of knowledge management and cooperation, the agent metaphor seems to be an adequate solution (Minhong, Jiming, Huaiqing, William, & Xiaofeng, 2008). It can be viewed as an encapsulated problem solving entity which exhibits the properties of autonomy, social ability, responsiveness and proactiveness (Wooldridge, 2002). In spite of these advantages, the kind of cooperation brought by the agent technology and notably in the e-business context is not sufficient with the emergence of Web Services, which are a new breed of Web applications. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.
Most organizations and companies want to exploit this new technology with standards such as the UDDI repository Universal Description Discovery and Integration (http://www.uddi.org/pubs/uddi_v3.htm) in their various tasks. For them, a Web Service can be defined as an application available on the Internet by a supplier and accessible to customers. Several works tried the combination of the agent paradigm with the Web Services. This combination is made for using agents as proxies that assist during the selection of Web Services according to some criteria (Maximilien & Singht, 2004) or even in the reasoning about the semantic description, the composition and the use of Web Services (Richards, Van Splunter, Brazier, & Sabou, 2003).