A Report on the “MathBroker” Project for Brokering Mathematical Web Services?

Abstract

We report on the past achievements and on the current status of a project on the development of a software framework for brokering mathematical services in the Web. The World Wide Web is currently evolving from an infrastructure for delivering static Web pages coded in HTML to an infrastructure for providing dynamic Web services that use XML as the common format for object data and metadata. These services communicate with clients (and other services) using the SOAP protocol [6], their interfaces are described in the Web Service Description Language WSDL [9], their behavior is described by semantic Web technologies like OWL-S [4], interface/behavior descriptions are stored in Web registries such as the one developed by the ebXML initiative [5] that can be queried by clients for lookup of appropriate services. While most Web developers focus on the use of Web service technologies for business applications, projects like our―MathBroker‖ project or the European MONET project [7] aim to support the area of computer mathematics where services provide functionality related to eg computer algebra or automated