Intelligent agents for on-line commerce: a crying need for service standardization

The number of multimedia applications on the Internet is growing each day. Also, a wide variety of online services have been offered to telecom network users. However, the introduction of new services remains lengthy, and access to new services is often a painstaking task. One of the main reasons behind this problem is the lack of standards for describing information and services. Therefore, a standard for classifying services by fields and features is needed. This becomes a real prerequisite for success in a telecom market that is open for competition. After giving a survey of some previous initiatives in this field, we present a generic service model and propose a set of solutions using standard languages, such as KQML and SGML, within a distributed architecture hosting intelligent agents. This approach also allows service providers to build on the existing infrastructure and to evolve it into an open, knowledge-aware, integrated business platform.