PPT Slide
Problem. Most agent systems contain some sort of trader (matchmaker or yellow pages) that they use to locate agents by description. This provides late binding of agents to some service provider but does not scale outside of the closed agent system. Also, the trader itself is usually an integral part of agent system implementations and not available separately.
Objective. Build a scalable robust trader component architected for the global grid.
Approach. WebTrader is a scalable trader that locates advertisements (represented in XML) stored on web pages that have been indexed by search engines. Query results allow clients to connect to the most suitable service. Advertisement types include agents, components, data sources, search engines, MBNLI grammars, other traders, channels, and other types.
WebTrader leverages industrial strength Web search engines so it is scalable, lightweight, portable, and robust. WebTrader is extensible -- recent changes to WebTrader support adding specialized matchers for ads of specific types. DeepSearch is an application of WebTrader that recursively searches other search engines and traders (using a federation design pattern). This makes specialized Web pages (not indexed by many search engines) accessible to DeepSearch. Also keeps a search history.
Demonstrations. WebTrader is used in the Science Fair NEO application to locate data sources for the location of evacuees and to find a geocoder component. In the demo, ISI Ariadne uses SRI OAA to request WebTraderAgent to find these resources. WebTraderAgent consults the Grid to find a WebTrader service and then uses it to discover candidate resources which are returned to Ariadne via OAA. Other demonstrations show trader federation, service rebinding, and WebTrader used to locate agents that use natural language wrappers. The DeepSearch demonstration shows WebTrader locating ads for search engines on the web and recursively searching them, opening up parts of the web that are usually beyond the reach of general purpose crawlers. WebTraderQueryTool is a recent hybrid of WebTrader and DeepSearch that does add matching and better supports application composition.
Plans. We are currently hardening WebTrader and making the design more open. We need to grow WebTrader ad populations. To do this, we will make it easier to create WebTrader ads manually using a GUI. Also, we want to try to harvest ads from the web to automate the process of ad synthesis. This is a web-size ontology question. We are also making matching ad type open so specialized search and ranking algorithms can be plugged in.
Technology Transition. We are hardening WebTrader and DeepSearch getting ready for a public experiment. We led effort of OMG Agent WG to review an Agent Resource Description and Discovery Service. We reviewed Agent UML.
System Requirements: WebTrader Agent & WebTrader Grid Service require: MS Win NT 4.0 (pure Java programs), Apache (latest) web server, Webinator 2.5 search engine (from www.thunderstone.com) , Sun JDK 1.2.2, Sun XML TR-2 XML parser, GNU Make 3.75, tcsh. DeepSearch requires all of the above plus Netscape or IE, ActiveState Perl 5. Need connection to Internet (licensing quirk of local search engine used).