Autonomous Agents on the Web : Executive Summary

The vision of autonomous agents on the Web is almost as old as the Web itself: in his keynote at WWW’941 , Sir Tim Berners-Lee was noting that documents on the Web describe real objects and relationships among them, and if the semantics of these objects are represented explicitly then machines can browse through and manipulate reality.2 These ideas were published under the Semantic Web vision in 2001 [1]. Yet in 2007, after having spent the better half of a decade advancing this vision, James Hendler was looking back to conclude that most ideas in the original article were already seeing widespread deployment on the Web except for agent-based systems – and raised the question: “where are all the intelligent agents?” [2].