Infrastructure and Interoperability for Agent-Mediated Services

An increasing number of services are appearing both within agent communities and as Web Services on the World Wide Web. As these services proliferate, humans and agents need to be able to find, select, understand and invoke these services. Today, services (e.g. travel services, book selling services, stock reporting services etc) are discovered and invoked manually by human users. In the near future, such service discovery and use will be mediated by agents acting on behalf of their human users. Such use of agent technology will be the next Web revolution. Instead of populated with human-readable documents, the Web will be populated with Agent-Mediated Services. For this to be accomplished, the Web must become agent-understandable, i.e. allow for semantic annotation of content.

Up to now, this vision has been conceived and pursued mainly in academia and research labs. However, recent industrial interest in such services, and the availability of tools to enable service automation (e.g. UDDI, WSDL, X-lang, WSFL, e-speak, .NET etc) holds the promise of fast progress in the automation in the Web Services area. Agent Mediated discovery, selection, execution and monitoring of Web Services will be a crucial test of Agent Technology. Agent Mediated Web Services is a confluence of Agent Technology and the Semantic Web.

In order to enable stable and scalable Agent Mediated Services, a widely used, widely accessible and extensible Multiagent (MAS) infrastructure is crucial. Part of this infrastructure should be languages for semantic annotation of content as well as for describing services, so that they can be discovered, invoked and composed. DAML-S is such a language for semantic descriptions of services. Another part of the MAS infrastructure should define communication and interoperability of agents. Various standards bodies (e.g. FIPA) are attempting to define standards for various aspects of MAS infrastructure, such as Agent Communications Languages.. However, there is no coherent account of what constitutes a MAS infrastructure, what functionality it supports, what characteristics it should have in order to enable various value-added abilities, such as Agent Based Mediation of Services, and what its possible relation with and requirements it may impose on the design and structure of single agents.

In this talk, we will present a model of MAS infrastructure, and our implemented RETSINA system that is an example of the general infrastructure model. In addition, we will show how RETSINA implements Agent Mediated Web Services through a variety of tools and mechanisms. Moreover, we will present DAML-S and illustrate its utility in the area of Agent Mediated Services.

Authors and Affiliations

1. The Robotics Institute School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213

   Katia Sycara

Editors and Affiliations

1. UFR d’Informatique, Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, 8, boulevard Niels Bohr, 69622, Villeurbanne Cedex, France

   Mohand-Saïd Hacid

2. Dept. of Computer Science College of IT, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

   Zbigniew W. Raś

3. Băt. L. Equipe de Recherche en Ingénierie des Connaissances, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 5, avenue Pierre Mendes-France, 69676, Bron Cedex, France

   Djamel A. Zighed

4. LRI, Université Paris Sud, Băt. 490, 91405, Orsay Cedex, France

   Yves Kodratoff

Reprints and permissions

© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Policies and ethics