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Semantic Web Services: A New Revolution for e-Commerce?
Katia P. Sycara
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
The Web, as we know it, is a collection of human readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs.
While the Web emerged as a World Wide repository of digitized information, by and large, the very same information is not
available for automatic computation. In recent years two parallel efforts emerged that have the potential of bringing the
Web to its true potential: the first effort is the Semantic Web which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content
of Web pages; the second effort is the development of Web Services which results in a Web where programs act as independent
agents to become the producers and consumers of information and enable automation of business transactions.
In this talk, I will focus on research that attempts to bridge the gap between the Web as we know it, the Semantic Web and Web services.
I propose the vision of Web services as autonomous goal-directed agents which select other agents to interact with, and flexibly negotiate
their interaction model, acting at times in client server mode, or at other times in peer to peer mode. The resulting Web services, that
I call Autonomous Semantic Web services, utilize ontologies and semantically annotated Web pages to automate the fulfillment of tasks and
transactions with other Web agents. In particular, Autonomous Semantic Web services use the Semantic Web to support capability based
discovery and interoperation at run time. Such functionality, provided in a reliable and low cost way, has the potential to revolutionize
e-commerce.
A first step towards this vision is the development of formal languages and inference mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core
concepts of Web services. OWL-S (based on the W3C standard Ontology Web Language (OWL) is the first attempt to define such a language.
I will give a brief overview of OWL-S and its relations with the Semantic Web and Web services. In addition, I will provide
concrete examples of computational models of how OWL-S can be viewed as the first step in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and
current proposed industry standards for Web services. I will provide concrete examples of OWL-S in action, and present
Semantic Web Services tools that my research group has developed.
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Prof. Katia Sycara |
| Principal Research Scientist (Professor), School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University |
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Professor Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the Director of the
Laboratory for Semantic Web and Agents Technology. She holds a B.S in
Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and PhD in Computer Science
from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has given numerous invited
talks, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers
dealing with Multiagent Systems, Software Agents, Agent Teams, Web
Services, the Semantic Web, Human-Agent Interaction, Negotiation,
Case-Based Reasoning and the application of these techniques to
e-commerce, crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing and
financial planning. In addition, Prof. Sycara is one of the contributors
to the development of DAML-S/OWL-S, the DAML language for services, as
well as matchmaking and brokering software for agent discovery, service
integration and semantic interoperation. From 2001-2003 she served as
Invited Expert of the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) Working Group
on Web Services Architecture. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory
Board of France Telecom, 2003-2006.
Professor Sycara is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research
Award. She has served as the Program Chair of the Second International
Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), as General Chair of the Second
International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 98), as the Chair
of the Steering Committee of the Agents Conference (1999-2001), as the
Scholarship chair of AAAI (1993-1999) and as a member of the AAAI
Executive Council (1996-99). She is a founding member and member of the
Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems
(IFMAS). She is a founding member of the Semantic Web Science
Association, and the US co-chair of the Semantic Web Services
Initiative. She is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems"; an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer
Series on Agents; on the Editorial Board of the Kluwer book series on
"Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations";
the Area Editor for AI and Management Science of the journal "Group
Decision and Negotiation". She also serves on the editorial board of the
journal "Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications". She has
served on the editorial board of the "ETAI journal on the Semantic Web"
(1998-2001), on the Editorial Board of "IEEE Intelligent Systems and
their Applications" (1992-1996), and "AI in Engineering" (1990-1996).
She is a member of AAAI, the ACM, and Senior Member of IEEE.
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