From SMART to agent systems development

In order for agent-oriented software engineering to prove effective it must use principled notions of agents and enabling specification and reasoning, while still considering routes to practical implementation. This paper deals with the issue of individual agent specification and construction, departing from the conceptual basis provided by the SMART agent framework. SMART offers a descriptive specification of an agent architecture but omits consideration of issues relating to construction and control. In response, we introduce two new views to complement SMART: a behavioural specification and a structural specification which, together, determine the components that make up an agent, and how they operate. In this way, we move from abstract agent system specification to practical implementation. These three aspects are combined to create an agent construction model, actSMART, which is then used to define the AgentSpeak(L) architecture in order to illustrate the application of actSMART

DAML-S: A Semantic Markup Language For Web Services

The Semantic Web should enable greater access not only to content but also to services on the Web. Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties. As part of the DARPA Agent Markup Language program, we have begun to develop an ontology of services, called DAML- S, that will make these functionalities possible. In this paper we describe the overall structure of the ontology, the service profile for advertising services, and the process model for the detailed description of the operation of services. We also compare DAML-S with several industry efforts to define standards for characterizing services on the Web

Semantic Markup for Semantic Web Tools: A DAML-S description of an RDF-Store

Easy integration of available tools will be a key success factor for the future of the Semantic Web. We envision that semantic descriptions of the tools themselves will play an important part in addressing this issue. Motivated by this vision we used DAML-S (a key initiative to support automated management of Web services) to describe Sesame (an RDF(S) storage and query engine). This paper discusses the major problems that we encountered as well as suggested solutions. This work is relevant to other Semantic Web research groups who wish to annotate their tools or to use annotated tools. Also, we hope to offer helpful input to the DAML-S coalition in the further development of their standard