Adapting Agent Communication Languages for Web Service to Web Service Communication

The underlying goal of the development of semantic representations for Web Services is to provide increased explicit representations of meaning in Web Services applications. One challenging area where this might be applied is in the message exchanged between Web Services in other words, semantic definitions of the meanings of data / commands exchanged in the execution of a Web Services based application. While current approaches such as OWL-S tackle these elements in service groundings by mapping processes to function calls with specific arguments, Agent Communication Languages could provide a potentially richer alternative. The work presented here and on the associated web page aims to explore how this could be done by showing how an existing Agent Communication Language (FIPA-ACL, FIPA-SL and associated standards developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents could be mapped into representations which could be readily used in a Web Services environment.