Using Agent to Coordinate Web Services

TL;DR

This paper introduces an agent communication framework based on OWL ontologies to coordinate web services dynamically, enabling semantic reasoning and easy extension, demonstrated through a movie recommendation system.

Contribution

It presents a novel OWL-based agent communication layer that enhances web service coordination and reasoning capabilities, integrating with the OWL-S standard and extending the 3APL platform.

Findings

Enabled dynamic web service coordination

Facilitated ontological reasoning with declarative descriptions

Demonstrated system with OWL-S web services for movie recommendations

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.