the ieee fipa approach to integrating software agents and web services
In many settings Web services are now perceived as the first choice technology to provide neatly encapsulated functionality for Web-based computation. To date, many standards have been produced and adoption is accelerating across numerous application domains. This uptake has long been recognized by members of software agent community with several approaches reported that explore various means of extending the utility of Web services with the autonomous control offered by agents. This paper reports on the recent work of several members of this community to consolidate their approaches into a common specification describing how to seamlessly interconnect FIPA compliant agent systems with W3C compliant Web services. This work has been conducted within the context of the IEEE FIPA Agent and Web Service Integration working group and will be shortly published as a new FIPA specification.
fipa software agent web service w3c