Agents for the Grid: A Comparison with Web Services (part II: Service Discovery)

Abstract

In order to build an open, large-scale and inter-operable multi-agent system in the context of Grid computing, we are looking at integrating agents technologies with Web Services. In this paper, we address this concern for SoFAR, the Southampton Framework for Agent Research. We focus on all technical aspects of creating, deploying, and publishing agents as Web Services. Not only have we been able to translate SoFAR ontologies and agent behavioural descriptions respectively into XML Schemas and WSDL, but also we have reexpressed in terms of XML Schema validation a pattern matching oriented query language used in discovery mechanism. Using this approach, an agent in the SoFAR framework can be deployed and advertised through a standard discovery mechanism such as UDDI.