Abstract
Semantic web technologies have shown their effectiveness, especially when it comes to knowledge representation, reasoning, and data integration. However, the original semantic web vision, whereby machine readable web data could be automatically actioned upon by intelligent software web agents, has yet to be realised. In order to better understand the existing technological opportunities and challenges, in this paper we examine the status quo in terms of intelligent software web agents, guided by research with respect to requirements and architectural components, coming from the agents community. We use the identified requirements to both further elaborate on the semantic web agent motivating use case scenario, and to summarise different perspectives on the requirements from the semantic web agent literature. We subsequently propose a hybrid semantic web agent architecture, and use the various components and subcomponents in order to provide a focused discussion in relation to existing semantic web standards and community activities. Finally, we highlight open research opportunities and challenges and take a broader perspective of the research by discussing the potential for intelligent software web agents as an enabling technology for emerging domains, such as digital assistants, cloud computing, and the internet of things.
Highlights
At the turn of the millennium, Berners-Lee et al [8] coined the term semantic web and set a research agenda for this new research field
Hendler [68] further elaborated on the intelligent software agent vision with a particular focus on the key role played by ontologies in terms of service capability advertisements that are necessary in order to facilitate interaction between autonomous intelligent software web agents
Motivated by the desire to further advance existing research into intelligent software web agents, in this paper we revisited the original use case scenario proposed in the seminal semantic web paper from a gap analysis perspective
Summary
At the turn of the millennium, Berners-Lee et al [8] coined the term semantic web and set a research agenda for this new research field. The objective of our analysis is not to survey all literature that could be used to realise intelligent software web agents, but rather to use agent requirements and standard components used in agent architectures in order to perform a targeted analysis of the original intelligent software web agents motivating use case scenario and the potential solutions proposed to date. Our primary contributions can be summarised as follows: (i) we provide the necessary background informa-
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