An intelligent-agent architecture for flexible service integration on the web

Abstract

A plethora of information and services is available on the World Wide Web; the challenge has now become to enable the interoperation of these services in the context of high-quality, integrated applications, providing personalized value-added services to the end user. TaMeX is a software framework that supports the development of intelligent multiagent applications, integrating services of existing web applications. The TaMeX applications rely on a set of specifications of the domain model, the integration workflow, their semantic constraints, the end-user profiles, and the services of the existing web applications; all these models are declaratively represented in the XML-based TaMeX integration-specification language. At run-time, the TaMeX agents use these models to flexibly interact with the end users, monitor and control the execution of the underlying applications' services and coordinate the information exchange among them, and to collaborate with each other to react to failures and effectively accomplish the desired user request. In this paper, we describe the TaMeX framework and we illustrate its capabilities with an integrated book-finding application as a case study.