Title: Autonomous semantic grid: middleware for supporting the interoperability of agents and web services
Abstract: Technological advancements in Web services standards have lead to the development and deployment of a large number of applications in open and dynamic environments. These standards enable the services to be discovered and invoked dynamically. The current Web however lacks the ability to specify the complete semantic annotations and is thus limited, to be utilized by intelligent applications. Semantics can therefore play a vital role in the automation and enhancement of Web services. Agents are intelligent entities that can be integrated with the current infrastructure thus influencing the negotiation, coordination and cooperation among the heterogeneous environments. We believe that the vision of the Semantic Web can be realized if the agents are intelligent enough to process and interpret semantic content based on the understanding which they have developed about the contents through the use of ontologies, since the agents have well defined reasoning, decision making, and interaction mechanisms. Our objective is to propose a new middleware based approach for interactions among Semantic Web services and software agents. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current World Wide Web aimed at marking web contents with richer metadata so that they can be processed by machines without human intervention. The Semantic grid is a new initiative to apply Semantic Web technologies to traditional Grid computing for automating the registration, discovery, composition and orchestration of grid services and resources. Ontologies can play an essential role for providing semantics in the Semantic Web and the Semantic grid and to lay down the foundation for interoperability among heterogeneous distributed systems. Semantics is thus a key component for achieving autonomy in the process of efficient service provision and utilization. Software agents can play an important role in the Semantic grid based on their capabilities to realize virtual organizations and virtual services that are a part of any Grid based system. The main focus of this research is to propose a middleware based approach for the communication of agents and Web Services and to clearly specify the sequence of steps involved in this communication process and how ontologies can play a role in assisting this communication process. These issues have not previously been addressed all together as a single solution. The issues of heterogeneity among these technologies are managed by providing architectural specifications and a prototype implementation in a middleware to achieve semantic interoperability between these technologies without violating the standards for both these technologies (i.e. FIPA and W3C respectively). As the development and implementation of such a complex system is cumbersome, π-ADL a formal language has been used to develop the specifications and formal verification of the overall system at an abstract level using a π-ADL.NET compiler.