Floodsim fact-file

What's the Problem?

Current Web Services developments provide a platform-neutral infrastructure for constructing heterogeneous distributed systems, but lack a semantically rich language for describing the services offered by system components. Conversely, the Semantic Web offers languages for expressing ontological information, but do not provide any explicit support for service description.

Towards a Solution

Floodsim is a prototype system which demonstrates the benefits of applying semantically rich service descriptions (expressed using Semantic Web technologies) to Web Services. In addition, this work uses of concepts from the Multi Agent Systems community, by providing an application-neutral foundation for service requests and responses patterned after performatives found in speech act-based agent communications languages.

The application domain chosen as an experimental environment for this system is that of situational awareness in a simulated humanitarian relief scenario. This is an especially rich environment because it contains a hetereogeneous array of data sources, and raises the issues of tailoring of information delivery to a user's needs, and the provenance and timeliness of knowledge provision.

The floodsim simulator consists of a map panel which indicates the locations of the entities in the simulated environment, and a control panel which shows the messages which are generated within the system and the users to whom they are delivered.

System diagram

Map panel

Control panel

Further Reading

Key document: Nicholas Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Nigel Shadbolt. Agent-based Semantic Web Services. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International World Wide Conference, 2003.

Semantic representation

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Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project)