Terry R. Payne: "Autonomy, the Web and Semantic Web Services" (COST DKG Talk Series)
Channel: COST DKG
Date: 2023-10-04

Abstract: One of the early visions of Agent based Computing was the goal of bringing multiple systems together serendipitously, and have complex behaviour emerge as a consequence of their co-existence, driven by user goals or external events (for example, in the case of RoboCupRescue, which was inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake). Whilst syntactic interoperability has been addressed through a plethora of (primarily web-based) standards; semantic interoperability remained a key challenge. When Darpa announced DAML, the DARPA Agent Markup Language (which later evolved into OWL), there was a keen desire to explore how services themselves could be modelled through ontologies. In this talk I’ll look back at the early days of Semantic Web Services, including the evolution of DAML-S and its successor, OWL-S, and reflect on how they were viewed from different perspectives. The talk will then provide a view on emerging opportunities for Autonomy and the use of services, from today’s Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph perspective.

Bio: Terry Payne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. He has been active in the area of agent-based computing and knowledge-based systems and services since the mid 90ies, and has a specific interest is in the use of ontological knowledge for the support of autonomous service discovery and provision. He is actively exploring the use of autonomous approaches to facilitate the communication and collaboration of heterogeneous systems, using a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches. This supports the longer term aim of describing, discovering and utilising autonomous devices and services in a variety of settings, including life sciences and laboratory environments.