1. Introduction to Agentcities & Related work in Aberdeen Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes MTP Seminar, 7/11/2002

2. What is an Agent?  Useless definition:  Autonomous Adaptive Mobile Software Entity.  More definitions that there are researchers in the area.  More about this CS5820.  “Black Box” of the Semantic Web.

3. My view of an Agent Personal Agent Personal Info Calendar Preferences Other Personal Agents “Web-Service” Agents Bank Agent

4. What is Agentcities?  2 projects,.RTD and.NET  EU Funded, 5 th framework  Started 1. July and 1. November, 2001  Both finish July 2003, but  Agentcities Taskforce  6 th Framework

5. Agentcities.RTD  14 Partners  Develop m odels, methodology and prototype solutions.  Reference benchmarks for.NET

6. Agentcities.NET  Project open to anyone.  Aberdeen is member no. 20!  67 Agent Platforms.  Provides services to support project members:  Information Days  Deployment Support  Working groups  Competition!

7. What do people do in Agentcities?  Build Agents :)  Deploy services within the Agentcities network.  Services: Restaurant finder/review, theatre/cinema finder, hotel finder, GIS, transport service, auction service, banking, ontology service  Ping Agent on each node. http://www.agentcities.net/globalapd.jsp

8. Technology support  FIPA Specifications  Jade, FIPA OS, April Agent Platform, Zeus, Java Agent Services, LEAP  Ontologies, DAML+OIL, RDF, KIF/SL

9. Agent Platform  Provides base-services such as message passing, directory lookups, agent life-cycle support, debug facilities.

10. Work within Agentcities  Agentcities is 1 year old.  Only lately has real services appeared. .RTD partners HAD to deliver services by August ‘02.  Most services are at the demo stage.

11. The Evening Scenario DEMO

12. Agentcities in Aberdeen  We became a member in January 2002.  WeatherAgent deployed same time.  First real service on the network !  We use:  JADE as our platform.  RDF as content language.  Jena as RDF toolkit.  RDF Query by example

13. Step 1 : The Weather Agent  Interesting case-study:  Uses existing ontology based on METAR.  Wraps the MetOffice webpage for data.  Ontology mapping issues.  Content / Query language.  Active for 9 months now, 1 query :) MetOffice MetOffice 2 DAML mapping Example Forecast in DAML+OIL Example Query

14. Eating our own dogfood: The IDAgent  Serves information about people in the department.  Static contact-details at the moment.  Future improvements:  Research interest  Research projects  Publications  Learned user preferences ??

15. The AKT Bus @ Agentcities  AKT:  Huge EPSRC project.  Lots of activity in Aberdeen.  Develop “whole life-cycle knowledge management tools & techniques”.  Deployment support from.NET  AKT Bus is the service invocation layer.  AKT Bus  Agentcities.

16. Conoise  Funded by BT Exact, follows from KRAFT.  Supporting Virtual Organisations.  Agentcities EO like scenario.  Agents and BDI used to solve constraint problems.  Agent interface to P/FDM and Prolog Agents.

17. Agentcities competition  Single evening planner for Aberdeen:  Pubs, restaurants and cinemas.  Separate constraint solver and learner.  Deadline 15 th November. Compo Demo Scoot

18. Aberdeen vs. World  Content language: RDF vs. SL  FIPA compatibility requires SL, so most tools etc. are SL based. SL Example (vehicle :colour red :max-speed 100 :owner (Person :name Luis :nationality Portuguese)) The Bobbin http://www.screampubs.com/ <ns3:servesBeer rdf:resource="beertypes#guinness"/> <ns3:servesBeer rdf:resource="beertypes#tennentslager"/> true 01224 497867

19. Aberdeen Query By Example  RDQL too complicated to write by hand.  Query by example is very intuitive.  Internal conversion to RDQL.  Could be “smarter” than RDQL. Brown SELECT ?x WHERE (?x, ?y, ?z), ( ?x,, ), ( ?x,, "Brown" )

20. QbEx with Constraints x > 1900 …..

21. Constrained QbEx to RDQL SELECT ?x WHERE (?x, ?y, ?z), ( ?x,, ?v_x ), ( ?x,, ), ( ?x,, ) AND ( ?v_x > 1900 )

22. Aberdeen, Agentcities & The Future  Several Honours Projects running now:  Organising a Conference.  Semantic Web Calendar.  Delivering E-Science services.  Research work on:  Learning privacy rules.  Dealing with false service descriptors.  We shall not rest until the whole world uses RDF.  Better RDF support for Jade.  Improve QbEx

23. Questions?  Slides and relevant links available from course webpage.