presenters:

• Katia Sycara
• Massimo Paulucci

Web services are being hailed as the Next Big Wave of innovation in e-commerce and B2B integration. Recent industrial interest in such services, and the availability of tools and standards to enable automated invocation of business functionality through message exchange (e.g. SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, WSFL, .NET etc) holds the promise of fast progress in this area. The web service initiatives in industry, government and research labs are many, diverse and for the most part uncoordinated.

Services may be provided across several frameworks: Web-services, Agent Services or Grid services (e.g. those defined by the Open Grid Services Architecture -- OGSA). As these services proliferate, humans and agents need to be able to find, select, understand and invoke these services. Today, services (e.g. travel services, book selling services, stock reporting services etc) are discovered and invoked manually by human users. In the near future, such service discovery and use will be mediated by agents acting on behalf of their human users. Such use of agent technology will be the next Web revolution. Instead of being populated with human-readable documents, the Web will be populated with agent-mediated services. For this to be accomplished, the Web must become agent-understandable, i.e. allow for semantic annotation of content.

Up to now, this vision has been conceived and pursued mainly in academia and research labs. However, recent industrial interest in such services, and the availability of tools to enable service automation (e.g. UDDI, WSDL, BPEL4WS, .NET etc) holds the promise of fast progress in the automation in the Web Services area.. Agent Mediated discovery, selection, execution and monitoring of Web Services is most probably the "killer app" of Agent Technology. OWL-based annotations of services (possibly using OWL-S, the DAML ontology for services) will probably be the most visible application of OWL and other semantic web annotation languages. Agent Mediated Web Services is a confluence of Agent Technology and the Semantic Web.

This tutorial will take an in-depth look at the current state of the art in Web Services and sort through the increasing and confusing array of relevant tools, languages and theories both from academia and industry. The tutorial will also present and discuss business models for web services and their potential for business value added. Many examples to illustrate the described concepts, techniques, tools and their use will be presented. The tutorial brings together theories, challenges, issues, languages and tools from Web Services, the Computational Grid and Agent Technology. In addition, it will present challenges and issues of how Agent Technology can best serve human users in the area of Web Services. More importantly, the tutorial will discuss limitations of current technologies and present value added advanced concepts, such as distributed service composition, semantic web enabled web services, agent-mediated web services, as well as open issues that must be addressed with emphasis on agent researcher contributions.