Introduction to Agentcities

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Introduction to Agentcities

• Related work in Aberdeen

Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes MTP Seminar, 7/11/2002
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What is an Agent?

• Useless definition
• Autonomous Adaptive Mobile Software Entity.
• More definitions that there are researchers in
  the area.
• More about this CS5820.
• Black Box of the Semantic Web.

3
My view of an Agent
Web-Service Agents
Bank Agent
Other Personal Agents
Personal Agent
Personal Info Calendar Preferences
4
What is Agentcities?

• 2 projects, .RTD and .NET
• EU Funded, 5th framework
• Started 1. July and 1. November, 2001
• Both finish July 2003, but
• Agentcities Taskforce
• 6th Framework

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Agentcities.RTD

• 14 Partners
• Develop models, methodology and prototype
  solutions.
• Reference benchmarks for .NET

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Agentcities.NET

• Project open to anyone.
• Aberdeen is member no. 20!
• 67 Agent Platforms.
• Provides services to support project members
• Information Days
• Deployment Support
• Working groups
• Competition!

7
What do people do in Agentcities?

• Build Agents )
• Deploy services within the Agentcities network.
• Services Restaurant finder/review,
  theatre/cinema finder, hotel finder, GIS,
  transport service, auction service, banking,
  ontology service
• Ping Agent on each node.

http//www.agentcities.net/globalapd.jsp
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Technology support

• FIPA Specifications
• Jade, FIPA OS, April Agent Platform, Zeus, Java
  Agent Services, LEAP
• Ontologies, DAMLOIL, RDF, KIF/SL

9
Agent Platform

• Provides base-services such as message passing,
  directory lookups, agent life-cycle support,
  debug facilities.

10
Work within Agentcities

• Agentcities is 1 year old.
• Only lately has real services appeared.
• .RTD partners HAD to deliver services by August
  02.
• Most services are at the demo stage.

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The Evening Scenario
DEMO
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Agentcities in Aberdeen

• We became a member in January 2002.
• WeatherAgent deployed same time.
• First real service on the network !
• We use
• JADE as our platform.
• RDF as content language.
• Jena as RDF toolkit.
• RDF Query by example

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Step 1 The Weather Agent

• Interesting case-study
• Uses existing ontology based on METAR.
• Wraps the MetOffice webpage for data.
• Ontology mapping issues.
• Content / Query language.
• Active for 9 months now, 1 query )
• MetOffice
• MetOffice 2 DAML mapping
• Example Forecast in DAMLOIL
• Example Query

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Eating our own dogfood The IDAgent

• Serves information about people in the
  department.
• Static contact-details at the moment.
• Future improvements
• Research interest
• Research projects
• Publications
• Learned user preferences ??

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The AKT Bus _at_ Agentcities

• AKT
• Huge EPSRC project.
• Lots of activity in Aberdeen.
• Develop whole life-cycle knowledge management
  tools techniques.
• Deployment support from .NET
• AKT Bus is the service invocation layer.
• AKT Bus ?? Agentcities.

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Conoise

• Funded by BT Exact, follows from KRAFT.
• Supporting Virtual Organisations.
• Agentcities EO like scenario.
• Agents and BDI used to solve constraint problems.
• Agent interface to P/FDM and Prolog Agents.

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Agentcities competition

• Compo Demo
• Scoot

• Single evening planner for Aberdeen
• Pubs, restaurants and cinemas.
• Separate constraint solver and learner.
• Deadline 15th November.

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Aberdeen vs. World

• Content language RDF vs. SL
• FIPA compatibility requires SL, so most tools
  etc. are SL based.

SL Example (vehicle colour red
max-speed 100 owner (Person name
Luis nationality Portuguese))
ltns3FreeHouse rdfID"bobbin"gt
ltns3pubNamegtThe Bobbinlt/ns3pubNamegt
ltns3pubWebSitegt http//www.screampubs.
com/ lt/ns3pubWebSitegt ltns3servesBeer
rdfresource"beertypesguin
ness"/gt ltns3servesBeer
rdfresource"beertypestennentslager"/gt
ltns3servesFoodgttruelt/ns3servesFoodgt
ltns3telNumbergt01224 497867lt/ns3telNumbergt lt/ns3
FreeHousegt
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Aberdeen Query By Example

• RDQL too complicated to write by hand.
• Query by example is very intuitive.
• Internal conversion to RDQL.
• Could be smarter than RDQL.

ltqQuerygt ltqtemplategt ltaktAcademicgt
ltaktfamily-namegt Brown lt/aktfamily-namegt
lt/aktAcademicgt lt/qtemplategt
lt/qQuerygt
SELECT ?x WHERE (?x, ?y, ?z), ( ?x, ltrdf
typegt, ltakt Academicgt ), ( ?x, ltakt
family-namegt, "Brown" )
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QbEx with Constraints

• ltqQuerygt
• ltqtemplategt
• ltrrestaurantgt
• ltrtype rdfresourcerTandoori" /gt
• ltropen-timegt
• ltcifvariable rdfID"x"gtltcifvarnamegtxlt/cifv
  arnamegtlt/cifvariablegt
• lt/ropen-timegt
• lt/rrestaurantgt
• lt/qtemplategt
• ltqconstraintsgt
• ltcifcomparisongt
• ltcifcomparison_operatorgtgtlt/cifcomparison_o
  peratorgt
• ltcifcomparison_op1gt
• ltcifvariable rdfabout"x"/gt
• lt/cifcomparison_op1gt
• ltcifcomparison_op2gt
• ltcifintegerconstgt
• ltcifconstant_valuegt1900lt/cifconstant_valu
  egt
• lt/cifintegerconstgt

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Constrained QbEx to RDQL

• SELECT ?x WHERE (?x, ?y, ?z),
• ( ?x, ltr open-timegt, ?v_x ),
• ( ?x, ltrdf typegt, ltr restaurantgt ),
• ( ?x, ltr typegt, ltr Tandoorigt ) AND ( ?v_x
  gt 1900 )

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Aberdeen, Agentcities The Future

• Several Honours Projects running now
• Organising a Conference.
• Semantic Web Calendar.
• Delivering E-Science services.
• Research work on
• Learning privacy rules.
• Dealing with false service descriptors.
• We shall not rest until the whole world uses
  RDF.
• Better RDF support for Jade.
• Improve QbEx

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Questions?

• Slides and relevant links available from course
  webpage.