Re: [ebsoa] events and agents as defined in an ebSOA

[Richard Manning <Richard.Manning@Sun.COM>]

Personal Opinion:

Greetings:

I just caught the tail of this thread, my apologies for not reading the
whole thread, attachments and links as yet; great to see activity in
this area...

IMHO (having done some work in this area), JXTA provides an excellent
foundation for distributed, intelligent, mobile, multi-agent systems
(also an instance of SOA). There is nothing preventing an agent system
architecture/design/implementation from supporting/integrating both FIPA
agent standards and OASIS standards. I'd also add W3C, especially the
Semantic Web efforts namely OWL/RDF. (FIPA info, http://www.fipa.org/
;FIPA is now an IEEE Standards Committee, see:
http://www.fipa.org/about/fipa_and_ieee.html) 

If you haven't already done so, it is worth a look at CMU's RETSINA and
Semantic Web efforts which c/should also be of interest
(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/index.html), though I don't know
the licensing requirements, if any. There are too many other good agent
efforts to list, as someone previously mentioned, though there are agent
standards such as FIPA.

While there may be overlap among the many specs, these are minimal and
can be normalized given sufficient interest (and wheel reinvention
avoidance). Consider FIPA-compliant agents which also support OASIS /
Web service standards and common bindings (SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/ebXML-RR/
etc.) and W3C standards (*ML, Semantic Web, etc.) deployed over a
FIPA/JXTA agent ecosystem.

Agents as Web services and vice versa, not an original thought perhaps
but also not a common thought. Perhaps these specs/standards may
converge and synthesize eventually, however at present they are often
complimentary...e.g., compare/contrast
BPEL/BPM/Choreography/Ontology/UBL/etc with FIPA Agent Communications
(Contract Net Interaction Protocol), Agent Management, Ontology, ACL, etc. 

For me, the great thing about all of this is that JXTA, FIPA, OASIS, W3C
are open, implementation, language, platform, network neutral standards
and/or specifications. There are commercial and open source
implementations for various elements too. Finally, while not trivial it
is possible to integrate and synthesize these many specs and standards
(even implementations) to achieve what "I think" you are looking for...

...and at the top of my soapbox list co-equal with agent systems...AI,
but I'll spare you my pro-AI rants & raves as this isn't the appropriate
forum ;) 

Regards,
Richard



----- Original Message -----
From: john c hardin <johnchardin@comcast.net>
Date: Monday, May 9, 2005 3:46 pm
Subject: Re: [ebsoa] events and agents as defined in an ebSOA

> Understood David, thank you. I was suggesting that we use 
> applicable universal 
> "concepts" from the JXTA projects, not the actual implementation. 
> Obviously, 
> JXTA could be implemented as an agent framework if the implementer 
> chose to do so.
> 
> I just wanted to make sure that we get a well-rounded picture of 
> agent concepts.
> 
> David Webber (XML) wrote:
> > John,
> > 
> > The caveat I have is simple - the design of ebSOA should be 
> implementation> language
> > neutral.
> > 
> > That is the whole point behind the BCM linking and switching - 
> its based on
> > classical
> > declarative logic processing - and can be expressed as XML 
> structures - that
> > can
> > then be read and processed by any agent engine.
> > 
> > There are literally 100 different agent engines out there - all 
> with their
> > own
> > proprietary syntan and API - (even if they are written in Java - 
> or maybe
> > especially
> > if they are written in Java!).
> > 
> > What the world does not have is a common method of integrating 
> *all* these.
> > That I believe is where traditionally OASIS can look to make a 
> significant> contribution...
> > 
> > DW
> > 
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: "john c hardin" <johnchardin@comcast.net>
> > To: <john@crossconnections.ws>
> > Cc: "Dan Pattyn" <danpattyn@austin.rr.com>; "David RR Webber"
> > <david@drrw.info>; <vasco.drecun@cpd-associates.com>; "Goran Zugic"
> > <gzugic@ebxmlsoft.com>; "Dale Castle" <dcastle@ebxmlsoft.com>; 
> "ebSOA OASIS
> > TC" <ebsoa@lists.oasis-open.org>; <richard.manning@sun.com>;
> > <discuss@jxta.org>
> > Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 2:48 PM
> > Subject: Re: [ebsoa] events and agents as defined in an ebSOA
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >>Richard Manning from Sun Microsystems presented on JXTA at the 2004
> > 
> > Symposium.
> > 
> >>Slides are found at:
> >>
> >>http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium/slides/manning.pdf
> >>
> >>john c hardin wrote:
> >>
> >>>I would like to start a conversation on the list re: the agent
> >>>architecture, as proposed in the Federated Enterprise Reference
> >>>Architecture approach.
> >>>
> >>>Thanks to Goran, Vasco and the ebXMLsoft team for creating the
> >>>presentation attached, and to David Webber and Dan Pattyn for 
> pointing>>>me to the BCM material.
> >>>
> >>>I think that there are several inputs that we can include to 
> round out
> >>>the ideas of a non-intrusive, event-driven agent model. Opinions 
> are>>>requested from the group on these, and preferences for how to 
> specify>>>the agent mechanisms using a combination of the 
> approaches here:
> >>>
> >>>- The Agent Framework is described in the attached BCM / FERA
> >>>presentation. There is a lot of good material here, however, we 
> need to
> >>>make sure that we are re-using stable OASIS specs where 
> possible. I
> >>>would like to map the specifications mentioned in the 
> presentation to
> >>>the existing specs.
> >>>
> >>>- The BCM Linking and Switching as a mechanism to bind to the agent
> >>>framework
> >>>
> >>>- Possibly including JXTA concepts, where possible, as they 
> describe>>>peering between components and applications.
> >>>http://www.jxta.org/JXTAFAQ.html
> >>>
> >>>- Complex Event Processing, using the concepts outlined by David
> >>>Luckham: From http://www.complexevents.com/
> >>>
> >>>Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an emerging technology for 
> building>>>and managing information systems including:
> >>>
> >>>    * Business Activity Monitoring
> >>>    * Business Process Management
> >>>    * Enterprise Application Integration
> >>>    * Event-Driven Architectures
> >>>    * Application Servers and Middleware
> >>>    * Network and Systems Security
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>-- 
> >>~~~~~~~~~
> >>john c hardin
> >>Chair, OASIS ebSOA Technical Committee
> >>http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ebsoa
> >>313.279.1377 new *VONAGE* number
> >>mailto:john@crossconnections.ws
> >>
> >>"The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the 
> image of a
> > 
> > global
> > 
> >>village."
> >>
> >>     Marshall McLuhan, "Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962
> >>
> >>
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> -- 
> ~~~~~~~~~
> john c hardin
> Chair, OASIS ebSOA Technical Committee
> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ebsoa
> 313.279.1377 new *VONAGE* number
> mailto:john@crossconnections.ws
> 
> "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the 
> image of a global 
> village."
> 
>     Marshall McLuhan, "Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962
> 
> 
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