The Semantic Web should enable greater access not only to content but also to services on the Web. Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties. As part of the DARPA Agent Markup Language program, we have begun to develop an ontology of services, called DAML-S, that will make these functionalities possible. In this paper we describe the overall structure of the ontology, the service profile for advertising services, and the process model for the detailed description of the operation of services. We also compare DAML-S with several industry efforts to define standards for characterizing services on the Web.

/pdf/daml-s-semantic-markup-for-web-services-2bz2kpfwet.pdf

DAML-S: semantic markup for web services

The Web is moving from being a collection of pages toward a collection of services that interoperate through the Internet. The first step toward this interoperation is the location of other services that can help toward the solution of a problem. In this paper we claim that location of web services should be based on the semantic match between a declarative description of the service being sought, and a description of the service being offered. Furthermore, we claim that this match is outside the representation capabilities of registries such as UDDI and languages such as WSDL.We propose a solution based on DAML-S, a DAML-based language for service description, and we show how service capabilities are presented in the Profile section of a DAML-S description and how a semantic match between advertisements and requests is performed.

https://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~pyolum/cmpe596/papers/matchmaking.pdf

Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities

JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is a software framework to make easy the development of multi-agent applications in compliance with the FIPA specifications. JADE can then be considered a middle-ware that implements an efficient agent platform and supports the development of multi agent systems. JADE agent platform tries to keep high the performance of a distributed agent system implemented with the Java language. In particular, its communication architecture tries to offer flexible and efficient messaging, transparently choosing the best transport available and leveraging state-of-the-art distributed object technology embedded within Java runtime environment. JADE uses an agent model and Java implementation that allow good runtime efficiency, software reuse, agent mobility and the realization of different agent architectures.

Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE

The authors propose the markup of Web services in the DAML family of Semantic Web markup languages. This markup enables a wide variety of agent technologies for automated Web service discovery, execution, composition and interoperation. The authors present one such technology for automated Web service composition.

/pdf/semantic-web-services-1a7wbvh28y.pdf

Semantic Web services

Multiagent systems are made up of multiple interacting intelligent agents -- computational entities to some degree autonomous and able to cooperate, compete, communicate, act flexibly, and exercise control over their behavior within the frame of their objectives They are the enabling technology for a wide range of advanced applications relying on distributed and parallel processing of data, information, and knowledge relevant in domains ranging from industrial manufacturing to e-commerce to health care This book offers a state-of-the-art introduction to multiagent systems, covering the field in both breadth and depth, and treating both theory and practice It is suitable for classroom use or independent study This second edition has been completely revised, capturing the tremendous developments in multiagent systems since the first edition appeared in 1999 Sixteen of the book's seventeen chapters were written for this edition; all chapters are by leaders in the field, with each author contributing to the broad base of knowledge and experience on which the book rests The book covers basic concepts of computational agency from the perspective of both individual agents and agent organizations; communication among agents; coordination among agents; distributed cognition; development and engineering of multiagent systems; and background knowledge in logics and game theory Each chapter includes references, many illustrations and examples, and exercises of varying degrees of difficulty The chapters and the overall book are designed to be self-contained and understandable without additional material Supplemental resources are available on the book's Web site Contributors:Rafael Bordini, Felix Brandt, Amit Chopra, Vincent Conitzer, Virginia Dignum, Jurgen Dix, Ed Durfee, Edith Elkind, Ulle Endriss, Alessandro Farinelli, Shaheen Fatima, Michael Fisher, Nicholas R Jennings, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Evangelos Markakis, Lin Padgham, Julian Padget, Iyad Rahwan, Talal Rahwan, Alex Rogers, Jordi Sabater-Mir, Yoav Shoham, Munindar P Singh, Kagan Tumer, Karl Tuyls, Wiebe van der Hoek, Laurent Vercouter, Meritxell Vinyals, Michael Winikoff, Michael Wooldridge, Shlomo Zilberstein

Multiagent Systems

The Open Agent Architecture (OAA), developed and used for several years at SRI International, makes it possible for software services to be provided through the cooperative efforts of distributed collections of autonomous agents. Communication and cooperation between agents are brokered by one or more facilitators, which are responsible for matching requests, from users and agents, with descriptions of the capabilities of other agents. Thus it is not generally required that a user or agent know the identities, locations, or number of other agents involved in satisfying a request. OAA is structured so as to minimize the effort involved in creating new agents and "wrapping" legacy applications, written in various languages and operating on various platforms; to encourage the reuse of existing agents; and to allow for dynamism and flexibility in the makeup ofagent communities. Distinguishing features of OAA as compared with related work include extreme flexibility in using facilitator-based delegation of com...

http://www.ai.sri.com/~cheyer/papers/oaa.pdf

The open agent architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems

The design and development of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA) 1 system has focused on providing access to agentbased applications through an intelligent, cooperative, distributed, and multimodal agent-based user interfaces. The current multimodal interface supports a mix of spoken language, handwriting and gesture, and is adaptable to the user’ s preferences, resources and environment. Only the primary user interface agents need run on the local computer, thereby simplifying the task of using a range of applications from a variety of platforms, especially low-powered computers such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). An important consideration in the design of the OAA was to facilitate mix-andmatch: to facilitate the reuse of agents in new and unanticipated applications, and to support rapid prototyping by facilitating the replacement of agents by better versions. The utility of the agents and tools developed as part of this ongoing research project has been demonstrated by their use as infrastructure in unrelated projects.

/pdf/multimodal-user-interfaces-in-the-open-agent-architecture-30sq5voh8q.pdf

Multimodal user interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture

An algorithm for generating the possible quantifier scopings for a sentence, in order of preference, is outlined. The scoping assigned to a quantifier is determined by its interactions with other quantifiers, modals, negation, and certain syntactic-constituent boundaries. When a potential scoping is logically equivalent to another, the less preferred one is discarded.The relative scoping preferences of the individual quantifiers are not embedded in the algorithm, but are specified by a set of rules. Many of the rules presented here have appeared in the linguistics literature and have been used in various natural language processing systems. However, the co-ordination of these rules and the resulting coverage represents a significant contribution. Because experimental data on human quantifier-scoping preferences are still fragmentary, we chose to design a system in which the set of preference rules could be easily modified and expanded.The algorithm described has been implemented in Prolog as part of a larger natural language processing system. Extensions of this algorithm are in progress.

Quantifier sloping in the sri core language engine

A distributed agent community is able to dynamically interact with alternative sofware technologies that manage distributed objects. The leveraging of capabilities of distributed object systems greatly expands the flexibility and capabilites of the distributed agent community. Through access to distributed object systems, the distributed agent community can draw on the capabilites of all the objects managed by the distributed object systems. The access to distributed systems by the distributed agent community allows for collaboration and intelligent planning that the distributed object systems do not themsleves provide.

Extensible software-based architecture for communication and cooperation within and between communities of distributed agents and distributed objects

The design and development of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA)3 system has focused on providing access to agent-based applications through an intelligent, cooperative, distributed, and multimodal agent-based user interface. Only the primary user interface agents need run on the local computer, thereby simplifying the task of using a range of applications from a variety of platforms, especially low-powered computers. An important consideration in the design of the OAA was to facilitate the reuse of agents in new and unanticipated applications, and to support rapid prototyping. The utility of the agents and tools developed has been demonstrated by their use as infrastructure in unrelated projects.

Douglas B. Moran

Papers

The open agent architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems

Multimodal user interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture

Quantifier sloping in the sri core language engine

Extensible software-based architecture for communication and cooperation within and between communities of distributed agents and distributed objects

Multimodal user interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture