Re: Re: Discussion on Modelling Effects

[Drew McDermott]
> What sort of concurrency did you have in mind that might be important
> for semantic-web services?

For a functional description concurrency adds additional complexity. On
the other hand it is often useful in practice to reduce execution time
and allow for a concurrent execution of tasks. OWL-S for example allows
Splits and Joins as well. In some cases, this concurrent execution
cannot be carried out in any order, since some preconditions are
violated. If I wanted to buy something through service A that costs me
100 Dollars and I wanted to sell something through Service B for which I
get 200 Dollars then I could call these services concurrently, unless I
have less than 100 Dollars in which case I had to call the second
service first. 

I think an agent that plans to compose services should be aware of this
or it should do without concurrency in which case the execution time
might be longer.

Regards, 
Jan Ortmann

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2006 18:28:14 UTC