In order to work systematically towards my PhD I want to use a method where I start from a very high level of arial view, 50 000 feet, and step-by-step, come closer to the target. The main purpose of this is to use this as a help facility to discuss my work with my supervisors and others who are interested in my work.
The initial view is just a little more text added to a PowerPoint presentation that I made to sort out my first ideas of what I wanted to do.
In the last years my interests and involvements have been Web Services, SOA, Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. However, back in 1990-ies I were involved in development of technology called “Agents” that I and many others thought would be used in big scale in near future. However, the Agent technology never took off and is still just played with in academic demonstrators even though Agents is foreseen as a concept both in Semantic Web and
Semantic Web Services.
Following background literature will be used initially in my work: o Spinning the Semantic web by J. Hendler & all, MIT Press Ltd, 2003-03-04 o Agents and the Semantic Web, James Hendler, University of Maryland – IEEE
Inteligent Systems, March/April 2001 o Semantic Web Road map, Tim Burnerners-Lee, 1998-10-14 o Semantic Web @ 5 – Current Status and Future Promise of the Semantic Web, James
Hendler/UoM and Ora Lassila/Nokia, Semantic Technology Conference, March 6-9
2006 San Jose, California o Agent Technology Roadmap - A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing, AgentLink
2005

The major impetus for my work is that Semantic Web finally is about to leave pure research and slowly picked up by industry. However, even though most of the fundamental technology seems to be there it is still necessary with more research and development of toolkits and ontologies. Another shortage is integration of technologies already developed within Semantic
Web, Semantic Web Services and Agents. My thesis will try to find a roadmap for an integration of those three technologies through analysis of “where are we to day” and “where are we going”. The development of all the three technologies will be described in three stages:
Today (short term), Tomorrow (medium term) and Future (long term).
In the research and development is the lower layers of the proposed Semantic Web stack quite mature in the context of research, i.e. XML, RDF, Ontology, etc. However, it is still a ”hen and the egg” problem when it comes practical usage in real-world applications. Especially are commercial tools and free open source software of good quality more or less missing in order to get the ball rolling.
Figure 1 Source: Semantic Web @ 5 – Current Status and Future Promise of the Semantic Web, James
Hendler/UoM and Ora Lassila/Nokia, Semantic Technology Conference, March 6-9 2006 San Jose,
California
In Figure 2 is shown several applications made by tools and ontologies developed in the
project MINDSWAP at University of Maryland. It demonstrates that even simple ontlogies and tools cane make quite advanced applications. The lesson to learn is that it not necessary to wait to start making Semantic Web applications.

Figure 2 Example applications of Semantic Web
The SWS has taken most of its concepts from Web Service and Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA), but have the concept of machine readability, i.e. ontology description of service, in common with Semantic Web. Today there are three major research and standardisation work going on in parallel, i.e. SWSF, WSDL-S, OWL-S and WSMO. A brief description of each of them are found in

2005/6
Standards
WSMO
Description WSMO (Web
Service Modeling
Ontology) has been developed since
Developers with Web Services
Modeling Language and Web Services
Execution
Environment)
Digital Enterprise
Institute (DERI)
SWSF
SWSF (Semantic
Web Services
Framework) is an effort by Semantic
2002. Part of a larger Web Services framework (together Initiative (SWSI).
The first meeting of
SWSI was held in
December 2002.
SWSF uses DAML-
S draft as a starting point.
Language Committee of SWSI
WSDL-S
WSDL-S is being developed in
METEOR-S project. The main purpose of WSDL-S is to extend existing WSDL standard with semantic description.
IBM and University of Georgia.
OWL-S
OWL-S is an OWL-
S is a OWL-based
Web service ontology and research effort started in May 2001 as DAML-S. In
November, 2003 the language was renamed to OWL-S.
Current specification
1.1 dates to
November, 2004.
Many companies and universities working in DAML program.
Standardization Submitted to W3C
More info
June 3, 2005 [ link ]
Submitted to W3C
September 9, 2005
[ link ]
Plans for W3C submission.
[
Submitted to W3C
November 22, 2004 link ] http://www.wsmo.org
http://www.daml.org/ http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/meteorhttp://www.daml.org/ services/swsf/ s/wsdl-s/ services/owl-s/
Table 1 Overview of research and standards initiatives today
We know that a lot of research has been done and still does. They have been foreseen as important components in Semantic Web, but many ask the question “Where are the agents?” and “Will they ever be used outside academia?” The history of development of Agents is long, least since early 1990-ies. First the major work was done in USA, in military and academic environment with some industrial attempts. In the last years has the hegemony been more and more been taken over by European organisations like the AgentLink, Agentcities and FIPA.
AgentLink is an activity partly supported by EU to coordinate all Agent projects running in
EU FP program. One of the greatest contributions from AgentLink is their Agents roadmap that is the continuously updated.

Figure 3 Agent technology comprises areas that will be addressed over different timescales
Even though FIPA is located in Switzerland it as large number of members from all over the world and is in practice the number one standardisation body within agent technology. More than 50 larger industrial companies have supporting their work on standards since 2002. A large number of standards are at the moment quite mature and stable. Their international acceptance is supposed to increase after the further work on agent technology newly was taken over by IEEE. For several years now it has been developed both tools and demonstrative applications based on FIPA standards.
Agentcities is probably the biggest and demo where FIPA standards were used to make experimental applications on a network of agent platforms. Due to lack further financial support is this experiment no closed down.
The far most popular toolkit for the FIPA standards is JADE (Java Agents Development
Environment). It is mature and heavily tested. It has now reached industrial quality and is ready to be used in commercial systems. The upper architecture of JADE is depicted in

Figure 4 The JADE architecture
When moving from today where we know what conditions are in the three disciplines of technology, we very much have identify development trends to watch what innovative research and industry think about the future of Semantic Web, Semantic Web and Agent technology.
In the period of 2001-2002 had Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila views of the Semantic Web
applicatition that are respectively depicted in Figure 5 and Figure 6.
Most things predicted have happened or are happening at the moment. Some things happened faster than they anticipated, e.g. triple store scaling, reasoner performance actually matters ad ontologies are there in spite of very little linking. However, some other things are yet to be materialized, such as:
• public information sources based on RDF, OWL, etc
• digital convergence and pervasive computing is emerging, but is not just at right stage
• progress on agents is not as expected
Now they believe the time has come to go out there and build real-life applications of what already is in place and hopefully make some money out of it.

Figure 5 Jim Hendler’s view of Semantic Web in 2000-2001
Figure 6 Ora Lassila’s view of Semantic Web in 2000-2001
Semantic Web Services are closely related to SOA. The difference is mostly that the former is generic and include all kind of applications, while SOA more goes in the direction of business applications. Another difference is that a SOA system does not emphasis on automatic realtime generation of services, while Semantic Web Services does. The work on SOA will mainly be driven by major software vendors like IBM and Microsoft, while Semantic Web
Services will steadily be made more mature by cooperation between academic and industrial research departments. W3C will play an important role as standardisation forum for SWS.

The projects mentioned in Table 1 have already made their first demonstrations based on their
respective “standards” and service lifecycles (se fig
Figure 7 Example lifecycles of prototyped Semantic Web Services
It is expected that the different initiatives will gradually harmonize towards one common set of standards for Semantic Web Services under supervision of W3C.
o FIPA o IEEE takes over FIPA o JADE is becoming increasingly improved with a range of toolkits to build applications o It does not seems to be much real competition to FIPA and JADE o Agentcities was laid down due to loss of support from EU IST o AgentLink (III) is still supported financially by EU IST.
There are several signs that the technologies described above are starting to merge. At DERI in Austria several interesting projects are going on: o Triple Space Computing (TSC).

TSC is new communication and coordination paradigm for machine-machine interaction.
TSC project will be a proof of concept through prototype implementation and use case analysis with Semantic Web service.
Technology approach is re-arrangement and combination of established Web technology and Shared Object Space middleware.
The overall architecture is seen on
Figure 8 TSC overall architecture o DERI project INFRAWEBS (Intelligent Framework for Generating Open (Adaptable)
Development Platforms for Web-Service Enabled Applications Using Semantic Web
Technologies, Distributed Decision Support Units and Multi-Agent Systems):
The overall architecture is shown in o DERI project SEnSE (Semantic Engineering Support Environment). SEnSE will provide an environment where:
Users can delegate change tracking tasks to software agents that proactively monitor the evolution and changes of design artefacts (tools)
Notifications can be based on the semantic structure of documents / resources rather than simple version changes
Information about changes can be done for indirectly relevant artefacts (tools) as well

Figure 9 INFRAWEB’s Service Access Middleware (SAM) architecture
The state of the art for Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services and Agent technology is briefly described. Further, the future trends and activities are indicated. They show that the process of integrating those three technologies has started and will continue in considerable pace towards the next generation web.