Extending Loosely Coupled Federated Information Systems Using Agent Technology - Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Agent Technology, and Collaborative Applications - page 124

Table 1. continued

CCA performs service mediation and query mediation. Coordinates communi-
cation between IC agents and EDF.
New data sources and services discovered through UDDI registry lookup.

Communication
Controller Agent

Information from CC is used by EDF to facilitate services from IC to interact
with the data sources.

Interaction Controller
Agent

IC agent performs conversation, negotiation and interaction with the data
sources.

<!- -Data source with three information stubs- ->
<!- -Data type with cardinality=- ->
]<owl: Class rdf:ID= “Department”>
]<owl: one of rdf parseType= “Collection”>
<CreditCardType rdf: D= “HR” />
<CreditCardType rdf: D = “IT” />
<CreditCardType rdf: D = “Admin” />
-</owl one of>
-</owl: Class
<!- -Other data type stubs- ->
<owl:Class rdf:ID= “Name” />
<owl: Class rdf: ID= “Email” />
<owl: Class rdf: ID= “Phone” />
]<owl: DatatypeProperty rdf:ID= “Password”>
<rdfs: domain rdf:resource= “#SignInData” />
<rdfs: range rdf resource= http //www.w org/XMLSchema#string />
-</owl: DatatypeProerty>

Interaction
Controller Agent

Data source

IC agents return employment history, financial stability, credit check and cur-
rent property value estimates to EDF.

Utility in the Running Example: From the loan preapproval application of the client, the loan officer
invokes the user-friendly interface screen of the PA. The officer enters the employment details and the
banking and stock information, and requests verification of the client identification number and ad-
dress. The PA ensures that all requisite information needed to pursue the objective of the loan officer is
available and forwards the KQML-structured query to the EDF agent. The PA returns with the results
of the finding in the preferred formatting style and detail specified by the loan officer. This is shown in
Table 1 (Row 1 and Row 2).

extended directory f acilitator

The EDF is responsible for maintaining information about the roles and responsibilities of each IC agent
that interacts with its corresponding data sources in the foundation layer of the FIS. OWL-S maintained
by the EDF provides a yellow-pages listing of all local data sources currently participating in the federa-
tion as well as the role specification of the IC agents that interface with the data sources.
In addition to keeping track of the type of agent that is instantiated for each unique data source, the
EDF will have the reasoning capability to determine whether an existing instance of an IC agent will
be compliant to interface with a new data source that might become available in the foundation layer.
The reasoning ability of the EDF agent is grounded in the semantic abstractions summarized from the
OWL-S document at the data source and the agent-specific information maintained by the EDF in its
own OWL-S document. The ontology document used by the EDF agent will store the syntactic and