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