University of Utah School of Computing/ARG

Agent Research Group - .net and Agents

The Problem

As we build more agent systems, it is clear that they will need to be able to interact more easily with web services. There is a lot of very useful information and facilities available through web services and the agent must be able to get at the information. In our current personal assistant system, we use completely ad hoc techniques. For example, suppose that you ask your personal assistant what the temperature is right now. Your personal assistant knows from context information that you happen to be visiting Seattle. Thus, the PA must go out and query a web service to find out Seattle’s current temperature. Our current solution to this problem involves building one or more “weather” agents who will provide weather information. These agents register with the directory service and specify what types of information that they can provide. The PA queries the directory service, finds one or more agents that will provide the requested information and then begins a conversation to retrieve the temperature data. You could even imagine that the PA might consult with several agents and compute an average, or it may simply take the first response that it gets back. In any case, the weather agent is responsible for providing the requested information. Our current version of a weather agent involves screen scraping from the various weather sites based on zip code or city name. Clearly a better solution exists. For example, we are already starting to see web services that provide weather information. For example, see:

The Solution

We are currently working on several solutions to this problem and investigating the tradeoffs associated with each one.

One partial result that we have accomplished is the ability to use Visual Studio .NET to work with JADE/LEAP. This describes how we got this working.

Support

This work is currently supported by Microsoft Research.