Agents and the Semantic Web

At a colloquium I attended recently, a speaker referred to a "science fiction vision" that was comprised of sets of agents running around the web being able to perform complex actions for their users. His argument was that we were far from the day that this would be real, and that the infrastructure was not in place to make this happen. While I agree with his latter assessment, I believe the former is far too pessimistic. Furthermore, a crucial component of this infrastructure, a "standardized" web ontology language, is now starting to emerge. In this paper, I provide a few pointers to this emerging area, and then go on to show how the ontology languages of the semantic web can lead directly to more powerful agent-based approaches to using services offered on the web -that is, to the realization of my colleague’s "science fiction" vision.