Knowledge technologies-based multi-agent system for semantic web services environments

Abstract

Intelligent Agents and Semantic Web Services are two technologies with great potential in the future. Striking new applications can be developed by using them. However, in order for these technologies to be fully applicable to real settings, several problems remain unsolved. In particular, Semantic Web Services need for an upper software entity able to deal with them, while Intelligent Agents have historically suffered from a number of drawbacks not yet resolved. In this paper, we claim that integrating these technologies into a joint environment can overcome part of their respective problems while strengthening their advantages. The necessity for integrating these technologies and its benefits are analyzed in this work. Based on this study, we present SEMMAS, a framework for seamlessly integrating Intelligent Agents and Semantic Web Services. The fundamentals of the framework and its architecture are explained and a proof-of-concept implementation is described. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.