Abdabi, the GNU Service Discovery System - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

The goal of Abdabi is to be a service discovery system for DotGNU.
It is moribund/DOA until and unless DotGNU development gets a significant revival.

A major design goal is to make it useful not only for webservices but also for other locating other kinds of commercial and non-commercial service offerings. At the core is an RDF-based web of information, which contains data on various companies and their service offerings. Everyone is free to submit additional information to this semantic web, such as recommendations, accounts of (both positive and negative) experiences. The issues of spam and potentially wrong or misleading information are adddressed by a web of trust.

The Abdabi system does not have a single central server. Quite on the contrary, everyone is free to operate an Abdabi server. When the data in a server's local database does not allow to answer a user's query in a satisfactory manner, the server can query other servers for additional information. (Such queries from other Abdabi servers must be answered using only information in the local database.) Each server may have its own rules for evaluating recommendations and the web of trust.

For example, the company called "netFluid Technology Ltd" offers, among other things, "XML consulting services". This company can use Abdabi to publicize this service offering. Now this "netFluid Technology Ltd" is the company of Chris Smith, one of the developers who contribute to the DotGNU project. I know from seeing him work on the DGEE webservice server that he's very competent, so I'll use the Abdabi system to recommend his services. Now suppose that you're looking for a consultant who can help your organisation to use XML to its full advantage. If you know neither Chris nor me, you need additional information in order to determine that this service offering is trustworthy. That's where the "web of trust" comes in.

The web of trust consists of people who use the Abdabi system to publish information on how much they trust the judgement of others. For example, suppose you trust Alice to some extent, and Alice says that she trusts Bob 50%, and Bob says that he trusts me 50%. Then my recommendation should be interesting to you, except if there are plenty of relevant recommendations from people like Alice and Bob whom you're trusting more directly than me.

Registration Date: Sat 26 Apr 2003 10:06:40 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: ? - Orphaned/Unmaintained