Component location and the role of trading in large scale distributed systems

Component software is a promising approach for dealing with the problem of large scale distributed system development, because it decreases development costs and increases software quality. One of the central issues for component software in distributed systems is the location of components. In large scale distributed systems trading is already used as a service location mechanism. This is considered the only way to manage services in large scale distributed systems where complete knowledge of the system is both unreasonable and unrealistic. Providing trading mechanisms appropriate for component development requires a move from appearance based (interface) to behaviour based (semantic) trading. We present a semantically enhanced component trading architecture that enables this move.