Agent-Mediated Semantic Web/Grid Services

Katia Sycara and Terry Payne

(full day)


This tutorial brings together theories, challenges, issues, languages
and tools from the Semantic Web, Web Services, the Computational Grid
and Agent Technology.  In addition, it will present challenges and issues
of how Agent Technology can best serve human users in the area of Web
Services.  We will present the current state of the art in Web-Based
Services and sort through the increasing array of relevant tools,
languages and theories both from academia and industry.  The tutorial
will contain many examples to illustrate the described concepts,
tools and their use.


Table of Contents

Agent Mediated Web Services
- Introduction describing the agent mediation concept for web
  and grid services, and the corresponding challenges, and motivating
  the subsequent technical areas of the tutorial.

Computational Infrastructure
- Presentation of the Web infrastructure that is necessary to
  support deployment of Web services for automatic discovery
  and invocation.
  - Proposed Industry Standards (SOAP, WSDL, BPEL etc)
  - Service registries, (e.g. UDDI), OGSA registries and Middle Agents
  - Agent organizations (e.g. matchmade vs brokered organization)
  - Grid Architecture and Virtual Organisations
  - Protocols for agent interaction with Middle Agents and Registries
  - Schemes for service descriptions and discovery (e.g. JINI etc)
  - Algorithms for matching service descriptions to requests
  - OGSA Factories and virtual services

Semantics and Ontologies
- Semantics for Web Services.
  - Brief introduction to the Semantic Web (including an overview
    of RDF, DAML+OIL, OWL)
  - Capability description languages for service descriptions
    and agent capability advertisements and requests.
    - Class-based representations (e.g. Jini, Infosleuth)
    - Functional representations (e.g. LARKS, OAA, WSDL)
  - DAML-S
    - Presenting services with the Profile
    - Describing workflows with the Process model
    - Supporting services with the Grounding.
  - Various industrial schemes for description and use of Web services
  - Tools for Semantic Web services (e.g., DAML-S/UDDI matchmaker,
    DAML-S virtual machine)
  - OGSA Metadata, Provenance Data and Service Data Elements (SDEs)
    
Human Agent Interaction for Web Services
- Challenges and techniques that address issues in Human-Agent
  interaction for web services.
  - Schemes for user delegation to agents of service related tasks
  - Interfaces that allow humans to pose queries for service discovery
  - Human-directed service decomposition/composition
  - Human involvement in ontology reconciliation and merging
    for service descriptions

The Future
- Conclusions, remaining challenges, open questions and future
  opportunities in the area of Agent Mediated Web Services


Supporting Material To Be Provided

Not all support materials that will be distributed are yet available in
final form.  The basic information is, however, present in the following
documents:

  DAML-S Technical Reports
    Available at http://www.daml.org/services


$Id: servicestutorial.txt,v 1.1 2003/08/28 22:10:27 mdean Exp $