hose properties, capabilities, interfaces, and effects are encoded in an unambiguous, machine-understandable form. The realization of the Semantic Web is underway with the development of new AI-inspired content markup languages, such as OIL, 3 DAML+OIL (www.daml.org/2000/10/daml-oil), and DAML-L (the last two are members of the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) family of languages). 4 These languages have a well-defined semantics and enable the markup and manipulation of complex taxonomic and logical relations between entities on the Web. A fundamental component of the Semantic Web will be the markup of Web services to make them computer-interpretable, use-apparent, and agent-ready. This article addresses precisely this component. We present an approach to Web service markup that provides an agent-independent declarative API capturing the data and metadata associated with a service together with specifications of its pro

Motivated by the problem of automatically composing network accessible services, such as those on the World Wide Web, this paper proposes an approach to building agent technology based on the notion of generic procedures and customizing user constraint. We argue that an augmented version of the logic programming language Golog provides a natural formalism for automatically composing services on the Semantic Web. To this end, we adapt and extend the Golog language to enable programs that are generic, customizable and usable in the context of the Web. Further, we propose logical criteria for these generic procedures that define when they are knowledge self-sufficient and physically selfsufficient. To support information gathering combined with search, we propose a middle-ground Golog interpreter that operates under an assumption of reasonable persistence of certain information. These contributions are realized in our augmentation of a ConGolog interpreter that combines online execution of information-providing Web services with offline simulation of worldaltering Web services, to determine a sequence of Web Services for subsequent execution. Our implemented system is currently interacting with services on the Web. 1

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems.

Abstract. Web Services will transform the web from a collection of information into a distributed device of computation. In order to employ their full potential, appropriate description means for web services need to be developed. For this purpose we define a fullfledged Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF) that provides the appropriate conceptual model for developing and describing web services and their composition (complex web services). Spoken in a nutshell its philosophy is based on the following principle: maximal de-coupling complemented by scalable mediation service.

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The Protg project has come a long way since Mark Musen first built the Protg metatool for knowledge-based systems in 1987. The original tool was a small application, aimed at building knowledge-acquisition tools for a few specialized programs in medical planning. From this initial tool, the Protg system has evolved into a durable, extensible platform for knowledge-based systems development and research. The current version, Protg-2000, can be run on a variety of platforms, supports customized user-interface extensions, incorporates the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) knowledge model, interacts with standard storage formats such as relational databases, XML, and RDF, and has been used by hundreds of individuals and research groups. In this paper, we follow the evolution of the Protg project through 3 distinct re-implementations. We describe our overall methodology, our design decisions, and the lessons we have learned over the duration of the project.. We believe that our success is one of infrastructure: Protg is a flexible, well-supported, and robust development environment. Using Protg, developers and domain experts can easily build effective knowledge-based systems, and researchers can explore ideas in a variety of knowledge-based domains.

Wikipedia is the world's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopaedic knowledge. But in spite of its utility, its contents are barely machine-interpretable. Structural knowledge, e. g. about how concepts are interrelated, can neither be formally stated nor automatically processed. Also the wealth of numerical data is only available as plain text and thus can not be processed by its actual meaning. We provide

The Semantic Web envisions a World Wide Web in which data is described with rich semantics and applications can pose complex queries. To this point, researchers have defined new languages for specifying meanings for concepts and developed techniques for reasoning about them, using RDF as the data model. To flourish, the Semantic Web needs to be able to accommodate the huge amounts of existing data and the applications operating on them. To achieve this, we are faced with two problems. First, most of the world's data is available not in RDF but in XML; XML and the applications consuming it rely not only on the domain structure of the data, but also on its document structure. Hence, to provide interoperability between such sources, we must map between both their domain structures and their document structures. Second, data management practitioners often prefer to exchange data through local point-to-point data translations, rather than mapping to common mediated schemas or ontologies.

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for a R+D+I Centre to organize, retrieve and share