Ontology Services between Agents and OWL Based Web Services

Agents and grid services are distinct technologies which arose independent of each other, having their own standards and specifications. Introduction of semantics in grid services play a pivotal role in making them programmable by software agents. Different ontology languages have been proposed for semantic description of these technologies i.e. Ontology Web Language (OWL) is a W3C standard for emerging semantic web, while FIPA SL is FIPA standard for Multiagent systems. These semantic description languages have different underlying support for the terms, syntax, semantics and implementation constraints, which hinder semantic interoperability among these technologies. Therefore, our research focus has been on integrating agent technology with grid services without changing their standards and specifications. We have proposed a middleware known as middleware ontology service, which provide semantic interoperability between agents and grid services by providing translation of ontologies i.e. translation of OWL ontology to FIPA SL ontology for agents and translation of FIPA SL ontology to OWL for grid services. We describe how the proposed architecture registers the translated ontology on middleware and exposes it to grid and agent communities for further querying of concepts, properties and actions. We also describe the test bed configuration through which a software agent will invoke and use a grid service published in OWL and vice versa.