Service-Oriented Agents and Meta-Model Driven Implementation

Current efforts have not enforced Web services as loosely coupled and autonomous entities. Web services and software agents have gained different focuses and accomplishments due to their development and application backgrounds. This chapter proposes service-oriented agents (SOAs) to unify Web services and software agents. Web services features can be well realized through introducing software agents’ sophisticated software modeling and interaction behaviors. We present a natural framework to integrate their related technologies into a cohesive body. Several critical challenges with SOAs have been addressed. The concepts, system and component structures, a meta-model driven semantic description, agent-oriented knowledge representation, and an implementation framework are proposed and investigated. They contribute to the identified setbacks with Web services technologies, such as dynamic composition, semantic description, and implementation framework. A prototype of the proposed SOAs implementation framework has been implemented. Several economic services are working on it.