| Software module | ||
| Intended to act as a proxy for you in some way | ||
| May be: | ||
| Tightly controlled | ||
| Autonomous | ||
| Mobile | ||
| Humans work sequentially | |
| Agents work in parallel and 24x7 | |
| Therefore, agents can be a major productivity multiplier |
| Average Web searches examine only 25% of available information | |
| Web searches return a lot of unwanted information | |
| Information content of the Web doubles approximately every six months | |
| Problem continues to worsen as Web grows |
Why Don’t We Have Agents Today?
| Information on the World Wide Web is based on HTML | |
| HTML is intended only for the visual presentation of information for humans to understand | |
| The best you can do is some form of word lookup | |
| There is no syntactic, semantic or logic description of the information | |
| Information is not machine readable | |
| World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard | ||
| Provides important solution to syntax problem and simple semantics and schemas: | ||
| <SSN>444-23-2656</SSN> | ||
| Now we can describe the meaning of words | ||
| Many applications of XML appearing: | ||
| Geographic Markup Language (GML) | ||
| Extensible rights Markup Language (XrML) | ||
| Chemical Markup Language (CML) | ||
| Builds on top of XML and RDF | |
| Provides rich ontology representation | |
| Key starting point for W3C Semantic Web activity | |
| Future releases will provide logic and rules capabilities |
| DAML ontology language specification released | ||
| http://www.daml.org provides public Web site with DAML information | ||
| 18 top-level research teams are developing DAML technology | ||
| Including Tim Berners-Lee (creator of web) | ||
| Dan Connolly (key developer of XML) | ||
| Supported by W3C their new Semantic Web Activity | ||
| DAML has the potential to revolutionize the way we use the Web | |
| As the Semantic Web infrastructure grows it will result in major improvements in human access to information | |
| Agents will act as real functional proxies for people and greatly increase their productivity |