ISRI Seminar Series
Katia Sycara

Thursday, 13 January 2005, 12 pm, NSH 1507
Lunch will be provided


Autonomous Semantic Web Services

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.
Under this approach, 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. 

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.


Bio

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 Agents Technology and Semantic Web Technologies. 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 holds an
Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean (2004).
Prof. Sycara's group has developed the RETSINA multiagent
infrastructure, a toolkit that enables the development of
heterogeneous software agents that can dynamically coordinate in open
information environments (e.g. battlefield, the Internet).  Prof.
Sycara is one of the contributors to the development of DAML-S/OWL-S,
the Darpa-sponsored language for Semantic Web 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.