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DAML PI Meeting |
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17 October 2002 |
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Find out who is doing what |
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Enumerate issues and open problems |
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Suggest potential new infrastructure, e.g.,
ontologies, software components, tools, … |
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Identify how agents+DAML can help in DOD
applications |
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Recommend next steps |
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Current experience: How has DAML been used in
what agent frameworks and what is the outcome. |
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Future: How should DAML fit into existing agent
infrastructures (DARPA Grid, FIPA, Cougaar, OAA, ...) |
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Agent varieties: How is/can DAML be used with
mobile agents, interface agents, learning agents, etc. |
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Ontologies: what common ontologies are available
or needed for agent-based systems (e.g., agents & their properties,
speech acts, user models, trust, policy, …) |
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DAML-S: How well does DAML-S fulfill needs for
service description & discovery in MAS (e.g., FIPA DF, Retsina, OAA). |
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Tools: What tools, software components,
techniques are available or needed (e.g., DAML to KIF/SL translators) |
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DOD: How can agents+DAML support DOD
applications, e.g., by providing needed ontologies (temporal, spatial,
geospatial, ...) or aiding semantic integration with DOD legacy systems. |
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… in contrast to traditional web services? |
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Nope. |
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But
there are some characteristics… |
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Agents do things and can be autonomous – focus
on decisions and actions (describing and constraining) |
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Agents are (often) part of a community of peers
– focus on communicating knowledge |
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Agents represent people and organizations –
focus on modeling their clients |
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Most agent concepts and technology came from the
client server and message passing |
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The web offers new paradigms |
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Shared memory vs. messaging |
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There is, as yet, no dominant, general agent
framework |
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Some standards are |
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FIPA (http://fipa.org/) standards for agnet
languages, protocols and services |
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Major DOD R&D frameworks: DARPA Grid,
Cougaar |
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Smaller communities: OAA, Retsina, … |
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Vaguely agent like frameworks: Jini, … |
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There is considerable interest and much
preliminary in using DAML in existing agent frameworks, such as FIPA. |
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It’s being used as a KR language, as an
interlingua, for ontologies, to describe policies, for service description
and matching, etc. |
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None of this has been codified as part of any
standard. |
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We should develop common ontologies to support
core services which facilitate multi-agent systems, such as: |
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Service registries |
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Authentication, security policy checker |
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Trust and reputation server |
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Etc. |
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Speech acts (inform, request, query-if, …) |
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Conversational policies and interactions
protocols |
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Policies for behavior norms |
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Security and trust concepts |
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User models/profiles for people, roles,
stereotypes, and organizations |
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In developing things like DQL we should use or
at least be informed by protocols designed by agent systems |
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These have been explored in several contexts and
some reasonably mature protocols have been developed and specified, e.g.: |
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FIPA IP library |
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Some ideas for tools that would be useful in a
MAS context were discussed, e.g.: |
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FIPA DF -> DAML-S translator could enable
access to Agentcities services |
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Well defined and documented reasoning module (in
Java) for DAML and RDF to use with an agent. |
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The envisioned grand convergence of Web, Agents
and legacy applications |
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Additional possible actions: |
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Evangelize in agent communities (DARPA Grid,
Cougaar, FIPA, OAA, etc) to get DAML used for … content language,
ontologies, service descriptions, etc. |
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Evangelize in W3C community to consider
incorporating agent concepts and languages |
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Notes