The mission of the Software Agent-Based Groupware using E-Services(SAGE) project at Georgetown University is to investigate architecture models and implementations that support an environment where humans can ubiquitously incorporate software capabilities into their daily routines. Given the recent advancements in service-oriented architectures (SOA), software services or web services provide for the capabilities of organizations to be openly exposed, easily searched and discovered, and made readily-accessible to humans and particularly to other machines. We consider an environment where human stakeholders work together collaboratively on well-established or even ad-hoc networks to accomplish a particular mission. These stakeholders maintain their own information stores and may also have software tools that assist them in their daily routines. SAGE approaches provide assistive technologies to manage the collaboration of the information and services as they become relevant among the stakeholders. We believe that autonomous software assistants or software agents hold the key to enabling the previously mentioned collaboration environment. Agents can store heuristics and rules that evolve over time as the requirements on the human-driven processes or workflow change. Also, agents can encapsulate the complexity of syntactically and semantically sharing both information and services. As such our investigations intersect with several broad research areas as below:
 Figure 1 illustrates a scenario where a software agent of one intelligence analyst seeks related knowledge from the services of other intelligence analyst. In initial experimentation, the environment is constrained by a workspace sharing environment (i.e. Groove) and initial studies are limited to data represented in some mark-up language (i.e. XML, RDF). Feel free to access our current publications for more information. |