Jonathan Dale

Open standards for interoperating agent-based systems

This paper provides an overview of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standardisation effort in the area of specifying standards for heterogeneous, interoperating agent-based systems. JONATHAN DALE and EBRAHIM MAMDANI describe the types of software agents which are of interest to FIPA, the methods by which FIPA members collaborate and produce specifications and also descriptions of the specifications that FIPA has produced. They also list the available implementations of FIPA specifications and applications that use these implementations, as well as the current and future work of FIPA. Copyright

Adapting Agent Communication Languages for Semantic Web Service Inter-Communication

The integration of semantic Web and Web services technologies promises to be one of the most promising new areas for development of intelligent Web applications. One challenging area where these technologies meet is in explicit definitions of meaning for the messages exchanged between Web services - in other words, semantic definitions of the meanings of data / commands exchanged in the execution of a Web services based application. While current approaches such as OWL-S tackle these elements in service groundings by mapping processes to function calls with specific arguments, agent communication languages could provide a potentially richer alternative. The work presented here shows how this could be done by mapping the existing agent communication language (FIPA-ACL, FIPA-SL and associated standards developed by the foundation for intelligent physical agents) into OWL based representations which may then be readily used in a Web services environment.

Agent Based Dynamic Service Synthesis in Large-Scale Open Environments: Experiences from the Agentcities Testbed

The notion of autonomous agents populating large-scale open environments, such as the public Internet, that are able to dynamically discover one another, interact and synthesise new software applications or results has become one of the key technology visions of the past few years. This Agentcities testbed represents one of the largest attempts to date to prototype such a vision: deploying current generations of agent and Semantic Web technologies to create a global test bed for dynamic service composition involving more than 100 participating organisations. The paper presents an overview of this initiative.

The Agentcities Initiative: Connecting Agents Across the World

This paper describes the aims, goals and current status of Agentcities, a worldwide initiative to create a test bed for the large-scale deployment of agents and services.