Engineering Web service - Agent integration

Web services are fast emerging as the dominant means for connecting remotely executing programs via well established internet protocols and commonly used machine readable representations. Software agents are now increasingly used in commercial applications to solve complex engineering problems, and these applications often expose or make use of Web services. As such, this paper presents a Gateway architecture for connecting software agents and Web services in a transparent manner with fully automatic operation. This Gateway allows Web services to invoke agent services and vice versa by translating message encodings and service descriptions between the two technologies. We also address how software agents offer the opportunity to introduce new modalities in the ways Web services are used and manipulated, including redirection, aggregation, integration and administration.