This paper presents an architecture and a methodology for agent-based Web service discovery and automated composition. We assume that Web services are described with declarative specifications like DAML-S. Then symbolic reasoning methods can be applied while searching for or composing automatically new services. Although several articles have proposed automated Web service composition from DAML-S descriptions of services, they all require existence of a central service description directory. We challenge these methods by proposing that symbolic agent negotiation could be used for dynamic Web service discovery and composition in a more distributed manner. Symbolic negotiation, as we demonstrate it here, is a mixture of distributed planning and information exchange. Therefore, by using symbolic negotiation for automated service composition, we support additional information collection and integration during service composition. This aspect has been mostly neglected in automated service ...