ENABLING INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THE

SEMANTIC WEB FOR E-COMMERCE

--YEFIM KATS

Abstract :

This paper examines an impact of the growing intelligent agent technologies

and the Semantic Web on the phenomenon of e-commerce.

We discuss the problems technical as well as legal arising from the

emergence of the new forms of intelligent software and consider the
possible solutions.

In particular, we review how the integration of the Semantic Web and

intelligent agents can provide a new environment for the secure and scalable
e-commerce applications.

INTRODUCTION

IN THIS PAPER WE ANALYSE AND DEVELOP SOME OF THE ISSUES RELATED TO THE
EMERGING FORMS OF INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE , PRIMARILY IN RESPECT OF E-COMMERCE
& THE NEWLY ARRIVING PHENOMENON OF SEMANTIC WEB.

IN THESE AREAS INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE IN GENERAL AND INTELLIGENT AGENTS IN

PARTICULAR OFFER SIGNIFICANT BENEFITS , POSING SPECIAL CHALLENGES TOO.

THE RELEVANT PROBLEMS IS VERY WIDE AND COVERS NOT ONLY TECHNICAL BUT ALSO
LEGAL ISSUES RELATED TO E-COMMERCE , SEMANTIC WEB , WEB ONTOLOGIES , AND
INTELLIGENT AGENT TECHNOLOGIES.

THIS PAPER GIVES AN OUTLINE OF THE GROWING PROBLEMS AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS.

What is an Agent?
A piece

software (and/or hardware) that acts on

behalf of the user

Unfortunately

there is no unique and universally

accepted definition of what constitutes an agent

Different

characteristics are important for

different domains of application

Defining Agents

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its

environment through sensors and acting upon that environment
through effectors (Russell and Norvig 2003)

Agents are active, persistent (software) components that perceive,

reason, act and communicate (Huhns and Singh 1997)

An entity that functions continuously in an environment in which

other processes take place and other agents exist (Shoham 1997)

Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some

complex environment, sense and act autonomously in this
environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks that they
are designed for (Maes 1995)

Pictorial representation:

Agents as intentional systems

Newly emerging artificial intelligence technology intelligent agents is

socially oriented and, thus could become an important component to fill the
gap between the technological and social dimensions of a modern web base
enterprise(e- commerce).

Trying to understand and analyse the behaviour of complex agents in a

natural, intuitive and efficient way is a nontrivial task

Methods that abstract us away from the mechanistic and design details of a
system may be more convenient

Intentional stance: ascribing to a system human mental attitudes

(anthropomorphism), e.g. beliefs, desires, knowledge, wishes(customer
behavior).

Buying behaviours :

Need identification.

Product brokering.

Merchant brokering.

Negotiation.

Purchase.

Product services.

Follow-up evaluation of customer satisfaction.

Examples of artificial agents

Monitors and notification agents useful for need

identification

PersonaLogic and Tete-a-Tete enabled to assist in product

brokering

BargainFinder and Jango used for the merchant

brokering phase.

AuctionBOT and Kasbah provide help in the negotiation

stage of a transaction.

Mobile agents & uses :

Above considerations are especially relevant to the so-called mobile agents

representing a form of distributed computing.

Such agents are particularly useful for product brokering , merchant

brokering, and negotiation. Their benefits include :
Parallel processing.
Efficient use of system resources.
Reduced network load.
Ability to make dynamic decisions.
High level of autonomy.

Challenges Mobile Agents pose & protocols

Acts as virus and causes similar problems.

Execute on server side entails special security risks such as unauthorized data
access , data destruction and abuse of host machine.

Example , a negotiation agents may renege on their obligation to complete a

transaction once they encounter a more promising opportunity.

For dealing with negotiation problem we have web service protocol( a

combination of protocol ) which can label the problem as atomic negotiationonce completed transaction cant be rolled back.

Semantically uncertain environment

is the biggest problem.

Levels of addressing :

Operational requirements aimed at optimization of the distributed business

applications

Social/legal requirements related to the data collections techniques and to

agent to-agent and agent-to-human interactions.

Software engineering requirements.

Requirements related to the semantics of e-commerce environment.

Required measures should incorporate issues :

Development of the legal framework and the appropriate technical as well as

business protocols for web agents.

Development of agent enabled semantic infrastructure

Development of agent oriented software engineering tools.

Software Engineering of Agents &

Multiagent systems.

Two major aspects of software engineering agents are viable design methodologies & ability
to use agents themselves as CASE(comp aided s/w er.) tools.

MEHTHODOLOGY OF BUILDING AGENTS AND MULTIAGENTS :

GAIA based on object oriented approach and applicable to multiagent
systems
MaSE - multiagent systems engineering methodology
AOR - agent-object relationship approach
AUML agent unified modelling language

DEVELOPMENT PLATFORMS:
JADE LEAP- by LEAP consortium, supports multiagent systems.
JACK-Belief,Desire & Intent(BDI) system
Agent factory- integrated BDI oriented framework
Agent builder- an integrated development tool.
JAVA is a general pupose software development platform, is also agent enabled,in particular,
due to aglets-movable java objects.

SEMANTIC WEB :

TheSemantic Webis an extension of theWebthrough standards by the

World Wide Web Consortium(W3C).The standards promote common data
formats and exchange protocols on theWeb, most fundamentally the
Resource Description Framework(RDF).

According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that
allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and
community boundaries".The term was coined byTim Berners-Leefor a web of
data that can be processed by machines. While its critics have questioned its
feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human
sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept

Berners-Lee observes that althoughsearch engines index much of the Web's

content, they have little ability to select the pages that a user really wants or
needs. He foresees a number of ways in which developers and authors, singly
or in collaborations, can use self-descriptions and other techniques so that
context-understanding programs can selectively find what users want.

Semantic web representation

Semantic Web concept assumes that explicit representation of data semantics

(metadata) is the answer to information explosion we face; thus,the Semantic
Web project is focused on reshaping the Web into the complex semantic
infrastructure including :

Web ontologies representing different business domains in a semantically

explicit way

Agent enabled new markup languages, capable to work with Web ontologies

Ontologies enabled security and trust infrastructure .

Semantic Web infrastructure :

CODA
This paper was conceived as a brief survey of the opportunities and the
challenges related to the application of intelligent agent technologies, the
growing phenomena of the Semantic Web to the development of global ecommerce infrastructure. One of the key lessons learned is a necessity to focus
research efforts on unifying the areas of intelligent software, Semantic Web, and
Web services in order to fulfill the promise that information technology brought
to the networked community in general and to the business community in
particular. In order to accomplish this objective, its important to overcome the
diversity between the different national and international standards in the area
of Web services and the Semantic Web. This, in turn, requires the decisive shift
in the existing software engineering paradigm at all levels technical, legal, and
educational.

References :

M. N. Huns. Agent Teams: Building and Implementing Software. IEEE Internet

Computing, 4 (1) (2000, January-February). pp. 93-95.

P. Maes, R. H. Guttman & A. G. Moukas. Agents that buy and sell,

Communications of the ACM 42 (3) (1999, March). pp. 81-91.

J. Hendler. Agents and the Semantic Web, IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16 (2)
(2001, March/April). pp. 30-37.

Q&A: