Stigmergic Multi-Agent Systems in the Semantic Web of Things

Intelligent, autonomous agents are still not available in the Semantic Web at large scale today. Also the fields of Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems are not working together very closely although they could profit much from each other. Existing approaches merely use the Web as a transport layer and are not properly aligned to the architectural style of the Web. The Internet of Things, which would be very useful for agents to act upon Things in the real world, on the other side is very fragmented and not easily inter-operable. The Web of Things has emerged as an approach to use the (Semantic) Web as an application layer for Things. It is still unclear however, how agents on the WoT should look like. We propose that the Semantic Web is a suitable integration layer, both for agents and Things. We investigate how a Multi-Agent System in the Semantic Web of Things can be build by utilizing simple reflex agents and the communication paradigm of stigmergy. We map Things and artifacts to Web resources that are managed by a Web server and provide affordances to agents through hypermedia.