Bridging multi agent systems and Web Services: Towards interoperability between Software Agents and Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web Services have been emerging to enable dynamic service discovery, composition, invocation, execution monitoring. On the other hand, Software Agents are envisioned as autonomous, proactive software entities that act on behalf its users according to a given agenda of goals. Software Agents have been envisioned as potential user of Semantic Web Services in order to interact with semantic descriptions of SWS to autonomously discover, select, compose, invoke and execute the services based on user requirements. However, there exists a communication gap among the both. The major reason is that Software Agents are not compatible with widely accepted standards of Web Services. This paper provides a solution to make Multi Agent Systems compatible with existing Web Services standards without changing their existing specifications and implementations, with an assumption that it will be helpful for enabling further interoperability between Software Agents and Semantic Web Services. AgentWeb Gateway is an initiative for dynamic and seamless interoperation of Multi Agent Systems and Web Services. We present abstract architecture and detailed design of the proposed system, abstract algorithms for required protocol transformations, evaluation of the system and analysis of results.