Semantic Agent Systems

We have all heard about a “science fiction” vision comprising agents running around the Web performing complex actions for normal users. Although, many people think that such a dream is far from reality, yet James Hendler thinks that such a concept is quite achievable in the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will not primarily consist of neat ontologies, rather it will be a complex web of ontologies with pointers to other ontologies. The present form of the Web which is mainly in the form of websites can be modeled based on the ontological information of the terms and concepts used in the Web. Service advertisements of the ontologies will be able to find matches for semantic links. James Hendler elucidates his concept of the future Web with an example of a ship stuck in a storm and how the captain manages to save the day using his web device to find relevant information regarding the storm systems using a web agent and is also able to call the coast guard to save his crew. The integration of agent technology and ontologies might significantly affect the use of Web services and the ability to extend programs to perform tasks for users more efficiently [Hen01]. In this paper, we shall attempt to use extensive literary survey to understand the extent to which agent oriented thinking and technology are helping realize the dream of agents and communities of agents interacting with one another to help human users as envisioned in [Hen01]. We shall see, how agents are interacting in different multi-agent systems? and how multi-agent systems are interacting with other multi-agent systems to form true virtual communities that are slowly becoming part of organizations to alleviate tasks for real human users.