JADE at AAMAS 2005

At this year’s AAMAS
in Utrecht, the JADE
Board
will host a five hour event to present and discuss recent extensions
to JADE and future development plans.

The highlight will be a tutorial and demonstration by France
Telecom R&D
of their new Semantic Framework for JADE. This will be followed
by a presentation of the new Web Service Integration Gateway and a tutorial
concerning JADE kernel-level services.

The event will take place on Friday 29th at 10am following Johan van Benthem’s
invited talk. The room location will be announced as soon as possible.

The event will also feature a vision of JADE’s future and a special open
discussion session during which we anticipate some short presentations of user
experiences, application examples and requirements. For this session, we ask
any members of the community wishing to make a statement to prepare a couple
of slides to help guide discussion of their issue.

The new Semantic Framework offers a powerful means of creating of JADE agents
by simplifying the complexities of FIPA-ACL semantics. With this new add-on
it will become possible to implement semantic agents that conform to the formal
semantics of FIPA-ACL. By providing the appropriate mechanisms to handle these
semantics, the add-on improves the mechanisms of interoperability between JADE
agents and simplifies their programming. In fact, JADE developers do not need
to make any effort in managing the exact meaning of a received ACL message,
which is particularly helpful while handling complex performatives such as a
“subscribe”.

The Web Service Integration Gateway from Whitestein
Technologies
was released with JADE
version 3.3
and enables seamless, bidirectional communication between JADE
agents and Web services. It uses is currently configured to work with the standard
Web service technology stack (WSDL, UDDI and SOAP) although the presentation
will discuss a forthcoming version that incorporates OWL-S for more powerful
semantic manipulation of Web services by JADE agents.

The JADE kernel-level services tutorial will feature a step-by-step guide to
the design and creation of platform services for JADE. This is a topic for which
we have received many requests for greater elaboration and this tutorial is
designed to address several of these open questions.

We hope to see you there! The JADE Board