Using Agent to Coordinate Web Services
📝 Abstract
Traditionally, agent and web service are two separate research areas. We figure that, through agent communication, agent is suitable to coordinate web services. However, there exist agent communication problems due to the lack of uniform, cross-platform vocabulary. Fortunately, ontology defines a vocabulary. We thus propose a new agent communication layer and present the web ontology language (OWL)-based operational ontologies that provides a declarative description. It can be accessed by various engines to facilitate agent communication. Further, in our operational ontologies, we define the mental attitudes of agents that can be shared among other agents. Our architecture enhanced the 3APL agent platform, and it is implemented as an agent communication framework. Finally, we extended the framework to be compatible with the web ontology language for service (OWL-S), and then develop a movie recommendation system with four OWL-S semantic web services on the framework. The benefits of this work are: 1) dynamic web service coordination, 2) ontological reasoning through uniform representation, namely, the declarative description, and 3) easy reuse and extension of both ontology and engine through extending ontology.
💡 Analysis
Traditionally, agent and web service are two separate research areas. We figure that, through agent communication, agent is suitable to coordinate web services. However, there exist agent communication problems due to the lack of uniform, cross-platform vocabulary. Fortunately, ontology defines a vocabulary. We thus propose a new agent communication layer and present the web ontology language (OWL)-based operational ontologies that provides a declarative description. It can be accessed by various engines to facilitate agent communication. Further, in our operational ontologies, we define the mental attitudes of agents that can be shared among other agents. Our architecture enhanced the 3APL agent platform, and it is implemented as an agent communication framework. Finally, we extended the framework to be compatible with the web ontology language for service (OWL-S), and then develop a movie recommendation system with four OWL-S semantic web services on the framework. The benefits of this work are: 1) dynamic web service coordination, 2) ontological reasoning through uniform representation, namely, the declarative description, and 3) easy reuse and extension of both ontology and engine through extending ontology.
📄 Content
Using Agent to Coordinate Web Services
C. H. Liu, Y. F. Lin and Jason J. Y. Chen Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering National Central University Jhong-Li, Taiwan jasonjychen@gmail.com
Abstract— Traditionally, agent and web service are two separate research areas. We figure that, through agent communication, agent is suitable to coordinate web services. However, there exist agent communication problems due to the lack of uniform, cross- platform vocabulary. Fortunately, ontology defines a vocabulary. We thus propose a new agent communication layer and present the web ontology language (OWL)-based operational ontologies that provides a declarative description. It can be accessed by various engines to facilitate agent communication. Further, in our operational ontologies, we define the mental attitudes of agents that can be shared among other agents. Our architecture enhanced the 3APL agent platform, and it is implemented as an agent communication framework. Finally, we extended the framework to be compatible with the web ontology language for service (OWL-S), and then develop a movie recommendation system with four OWL-S semantic web services on the framework. The benefits of this work are: 1) dynamic web service coordination, 2) ontological reasoning through uniform representation, namely, the declarative description, and 3) easy reuse and extension of both ontology and engine through extending ontology. Keywords- agent communication; semantic web service; agent mentality layer I. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, agent and web service are two separate research areas. The research on agent focuses on problem solving mechanisms in distributed environment. A widely known agent model is the belief, desire and intention (BDI) model. Each agent has its capability (actions). Also, each has its mental attitude (what it believes). On the other hand, the research on web service concentrates on distributed technique and standard such as web service description language (WSDL), simple object access protocol (SOAP) and universal definition and discovery integrated (UDDI). However, web services are not reliable and easy-to-use due to the fact that they are at remote sites that a user has no control over them. Additionally, the web services provide a static description on the Web, thereby making it more difficult for users to use them. Incidentally, the Semantic Web is a highly-anticipated infrastructure for agents to run on it and to perform complex actions for their users [1] [2] [3]. Further, an agent is suitable to coordinate with each other with the same purpose in distributed environments [4] [5]. For example, an agent is able to proactively request other agents for a movie recommendation, and then the requested agents respond reactively the name of some movies such as “Night at the museum” or “Brokeback Mountain” through agent communication. For agent communication, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) interaction protocol forms a suite of protocol standards, which defines 22 communicative acts. Through the communication mechanisms, the agent decides the proper agents to execute their actions, which are implemented as semantic web services that in turn are annotated web services in this paper. Thus, the web services can be coordinated through the agent communication [6]. A problem with agent communication is that there is no cross-platform, uniform vocabulary to identify concepts used in various agent programs. Further, when an agent communicates with other agents, it cannot predict the mental attitudes of other agents with its mental model. This causes difficulty and complexity in communication. The method of agent communication is thus questioned by some researches [7] [8]. John Yen [9] introduced a manner in which the agents can form a team and share mental models with each other in order to make decisions. Fortunately, ontology is a document that formally defines a vocabulary [10]. The web ontology language (OWL) is a popular language to describe ontology, and it allows people to utilize the uniform referential identifier (URI) to give every concept a specific term such as those used in agent communication. It also defines semantics of the terms, and organizes all kinds of terms by using relations among the terms. The terms can be shared among agents. A special ontology is called operational ontology, in which the operational concepts are represented in a declarative description. By using OWL to describe the operational ontology [11], this problem can be solved. Further, the mental attitudes of agents are shared among other agents, which is called proposition ontology (to be covered shortly). This paper presents an agent communication framework with operational ontology, as well as the mental attitude of agent, to facilitate agent communication. This paper is organized
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