engleski

Semantic Agents Coordination

Software agent is a program that acts on behalf of his owner or user while conducting complex information and communication actions over the Web. From user’ s point of view agents contribute in enhancing the efficiency by reducing time necessary for executing personal or bussines tasks. There are numerous possible applications of software agents in the real world, but one of their limitations is a fact they have no ability to reason in semantic manner. Therefore, sometimes they can not properly substitute the man in executing some task. The new idea that solves this problem is the technology of Semantic Web. Semantic Agents developed during this project are providing searching and matchmaking of Web Services based on ontologies that define description terminology of these Web Services in exact manner. By applying the language of Semantic Web every Web Service can be described by ontology for description of Web Services OWL-S (Web Ontology Language for Services) and one or more domain ontologies that define concepts important for particular domain of interest. Concepts in domain ontologies, same as relations between the concepts themselves, are specified with OWL (Web Ontology Language). The goal of this project is to research the possibility of applying the language of Semantic Web for defining the content in ACL (Agent Communication Language) with intention of effective coordination of Semantic Agents that play different roles in multi-agent systems. Coordination between agents is achieved by applying adequate agent conversation protocols defined by FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) standardization authority. Intelligent software agents are implemented by using JADE agent platform. To demonstrate the results of this project the multi-agent system, representing electronic market, is modeled. That electronic market shows the capability of Semantic Agents in semantical comparison of required and advertised Web Services according to user preferences. Doing that Semantic Agents are enabling Buyer Agents to find Seller Agents that correspond to their needs much more accurately than classical Matching Agent.

Web Services; Semantic Web; intelligent software agents; JADE agent platform; service matchmaking

Tehnički izvještaj s ljetne radionice Summer Camp 2005 koja je održana u organizaciji kompanije Ericsson Nikola Tesla i Fakulteta elektrotehnike i računarstva Sveučilišta u Zagrebu