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Infrastructure and Interoperability for Agent-Mediated Services
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Infrastructure and Interoperability for Agent-Mediated Services
Katia Sycara5 
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The Robotics Institute School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 |
Abstract
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.
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