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Gateway Architecture
for Web-Based Agent Services
Tobias Betz, Lawrence Cabac, and Matthias Wester-Ebbinghaus
University of Hamburg
Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences
Department of Informatics
{ betz,cabac,wester } @informatik.uni-hamburg.de
http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/TGI
Abstract. Many publications in the last years point out the benefit
of combining software agents and Web services. These approaches are
mainly based on W3C compliant Web services and try to integrate them
into FIPA compliant agent systems. The major obstacles are mismatches
in service description and communication. This paper presents a Gateway
architecture for connecting software agents and RESTful Web services
based on JSON communication. To keep the communication transparent
the Gateway translates the message encodings in both ways without any
restrictions for the participating platforms. Instead of translating and
offering machine-readable service descriptions, this approach puts the
focus on human-machine interactions with software agent services. For
this purpose we provide a Javascript framework to support the developer
to create dynamic Web pages that act as human-readable service descrip-
tions and also as service invocation application. Moreover, with the help
of this approach it is possible to create a Web-based and agent-oriented
graphical user interface.
Keywords: Web services, REST, WebSocket, Multi-Agent System,
MULAN, FIPA, WebGateway.
1
Introduction
The fusion of multi-agent systems and Web services tries to combine the best as-
pects of both technologies. On one hand, we have Web services with their advan-
tages in terms of interoperability as well as flexibility in heterogeneous
systems and their ability to automate service invocations with the help of machine-
readable service descriptions. On the other hand, we have multi-agent systems
with their strengths in terms of autonomic and intelligent agent behavior. The
combination of both technologies results in hybrid systems that are able to act
in both worlds and offer a promising solution for the automation of service dis-
covery, composition and invocation. From the perspective of multi-agent systems
these issues are addressed in many publications [4,6,11], which results in a variety
of solutions. In contrast to these approaches, we present an approach that does
 
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