RCal: A Case Study on Semantic Web Agents

摘要

The Semantic Web promises to change the way agents navigate, harvest and utilize information on the internet. By providing a structured, distributed representation for expressing concepts and relationships defined by multiple ontologies, it is now possible for agents to read and reason about published knowledge, without the need for scrapers, information agents, and centralized ontologies. We present the RETSINA Calendar Agent, a distributed meeting scheduler, that reads schedules (such as conference programs, events, etc) marked up in RDF on the Semantic Web, and imports these into the user's Personal Information Manager. The embedded Semantic Web Browsing tool allows the user to explore related concepts within the schedule, and to query other agents and service providers for more information.