Implementing Agent-based Web Services

Abstract

As part of the Agentcities project, we have developed a prototype of an Evening Organiser application which allows users to flexibly and dynamically schedule activities within an itinerary. The Evening Organiser and the Web-accessible restaurant and cinema services which it uses have been developed within a generic service environment and the implementation of this has been built using the April Agent Platform, the DAML+OIL ontology language, the DAML Query Language and the Java Theorem Prover. This service environment is populated with agents of different natures, such as service instances and service finders. Service instances represent individual business entities, such as restaurants and cinemas. Service finders represent aggregated views over service instances, such as Yahoo!-hosted restaurants or Citysearch-hosted cinemas. The details of the implementation of these Web Services are described through the use of a motivating scenario.