Browsing schedules - An agent-based approach to navigating the Semantic Web

Abstract

The Semantic Web promises to change the way agents navigate, harvest and utilize information on the internet. By providing a structured, distributed representation for expressing concepts and relationships defined by multiple ontologies, it is now possible for agents to read and reason about published knowledge, without the need for scrapers, information agents, and centralized ontologies. Agents can utilize this knowledge to seek and invoke other agents and web services, thus supporting navigation across the Semantic Web. We demonstrate how agents support enhanced navigation within a conference-schedule domain, and present three agent-based services: the RETSINA Calendar Agent, which reasons about schedules marked up on the Semantic Web; the DMA2ICal Translation Agent which provides translation services between schedules grounded in different ontologies, and a Conference Agent that invokes the Calendar Agent. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.