Intelligent Agents meet the Semantic Web

The concept of an agent is ubiquitous in Computer Science. During the past decade a "software agents" paradigm has emerged which views agents as autonomous, cooperating processes which use expressive communication languages to exchange information and knowledge and to coordinate their activities. This has been seen as a way to capitalize on the opportunities (and solve many of the problems) created by the Internet and Web. Yet the technology has not yet made it out of our laboratories. Was it just another AI dream? Or maybe part of the "irrational exuberance" of the dot com era? We argue that the vision is still a good one and will describe how its realization is happening today using semantic web technologies.

The semantic web is defined as "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." This talk will introduce the underlying concepts, describe current languages and tools and show how the semantic web is being used to solve problems in distributed computing, multiagent systems and grid computing.