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Despite years of
research in agent technologies, software agents are still not in widespread
use. A major problem has been the lack of infrastructure and significant
amounts of machine-readable information to allow agents to accomplish things
meaningful to most of us. The advent of the World Wide Web, XML and now DAML
provides the capability to markup very large amounts of information and the
development of the agents to exploit that markup will follow close behind. It
will become compelling to markup your information in a machine-readable
format. If one company has their information available for use by agents and
another company does not, the first company will have a significant
competitive advantage. The same situation will exist for military Web sites
that are trying to get important information out to key subscribers. Once the
ball starts rolling and the tools become available to make it easy to use
machine-readable markup, the transformation into the Semantic Web will begin
to accelerate rapidly.
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