Context-aware agents for user-oriented web services discovery and execution

Service-oriented computing (SOC) suggests that the Internet will be an open repository of many modular capabilities realized as web services. Organizations may be able to leverage this SOC paradigm if their employees are able to ubiquitously incorporate such capabilities and their resulting information into their daily practices. It is impractical to assume that human users will be able to manually search vast distributed repositories at real-time. This paper presents an architecture, Software Agent-Based Groupware using E-services (SAGE), that incorporates the use of intelligent agents to integrate human users with web services. SAGE provides background search and discovery approaches, thus enabling human users to exploit service-based capabilities that were previously too time-consuming to locate and integrate. We present a multi-agent system where each agent learns the rule-based preferences of a human user with regards to their current operational “context” and manages the incorporation of relevant web services.