Intelligent Web Servers as Agents

Software agents have been recognized as one of the main building blocks of the emerging infrastructure for the Semantic Web, but their relationship with more standard components, such as Web servers and clients, is still not clear. At the server side, a possible role for agents is to enhance the capabilities of servers using their intelligence to provide more complex services and behaviors. In this paper we explore the role of agents at the server side presenting an Open Service Architecture (OSA) which extends the centralized Internet Reasoning System (IRS-II) to a distributed scenario. The architecture uses a distributed facilitation protocol which integrates Web Services with agent communication languages. Finally we present an implementation which extends Tomcat with these features. 1. Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, University of Bologna, via Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy.