environmental data exchange network – inland water april 2002ist-2000-29317 eden-iw1 environmental...

April 2002 IST-2000-29317 EDEN-IW1

Environmental Data Exchange Network – Inland Water

Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water

GENERAL INTRODUCTION



Overview:

• Project (partners, main thrusts)

• Users

• Objectives, goals and vision

• Technology– Agents: FIPA

• Final remarks



Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Italy

European Dynamics S.A. (ED), Greece

Joint Research Centre (JRC), EU

National Environmental Research Institute (NERI), Denmark

Office International de l'Eau (IOW), France

Queen Mary and Westfield College (QMW), UK

(special thanks to S. Poslad for slides linked to technology!)

Partners:



5 main thrusts:• Advanced agent technology

• Inland Water application

• Enrich environmental management

• Assure efficient and effective semantic management

• Dissemination: serving the users



User community:

European Environment AgencyUnited States Environmental Protection AgencyUnited States Department of Energy United States Department of DefenceEuropean Topic Centre for WaterItalian Ministry for the Environment.



Objectives:

• provide distributed environmental data to policy makers

• through an intelligent, configurable interface

• acting as a one-stop shop

• databases, translations, models, policy support



Vision

• Potentials for making a world-wide database

• for inland water; all water or indeed all environmental data

• ready for policy support

• Potential to do for databases what the HTML has done for documents



Data harmonisation goals:• maintaining autonomy of the data custodians

• databases are integrated into an efficient tool

• shared knowledge base

• providing uniform access to disparate information resource

• useful for policy support



Project will help solve:• Policy making based on data

• gathering data

• providing the Users with information for framing and improving data comparability

• info on state and trends

• generating regular indicator-based reports.



Inland Water data: goal

• available through one common interface,

• independent of physical or logical location

• independent of database languages

• independent of specific nomenclature

• output available in more than one language



Technology

• Agent based technology

• Standard chosen: FIPA (The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents)

• Base technology: JAVA

• Implementation choice: JADE http://jade.cselt.it



Handling unavailable resources

• Let’s consider a general problem domain such as resource (e.g., information) access

• Our goal is to access a resource at a known place - but our plan to retrieve it does not work - it is not currently available



Accessing Available Resources

?



Handling unavailable resources

• What do we do next?

• Some options:• Change the goal, e.g., give up, go back later– Keep the goal, change the plan by reasoning

internally - single agent approach– Keep the goal, change the plan by reasoning

externally - multi-agent approach



Handling unavailable resources: brute force search

??

3 etc.

1

2

?



Handling unavailable resources: single agent approach

Some single agent options• Change the plan to achieve the goal ( single

agent approach)– Try multiple times– Initiate our own general search– Reason internally, use experience (where else might

it be?)– These are not scalable



Handling unavailable resources: using a domain assistant

?



Handling unavailable resources: multi agent approach

Modifying the plan to access the resource (joint –planning, getting assistance)

• How do we locate an assistant?

• How should we interact with the assistant?



Handling unavailable resources: locating an assistant

How do we identify an assistant?• Client-driven

– A priori knowledge– Search– Broadcast

• Service-driven– Assistant identifies her/himself - it’s a duty of the

assistant to be proactive



Handling unavailable resources: Delegating resource retrieval



Handling unavailable resources: delegation

Buyer StockSupply

StoreAssistant

StoreManager

queryfailure

inform

inform

requestquery

inform

inform



Querying versus Delegating

• We could delegate the action of retrieving an article to an assistant

• But we don’t wish to … because:– Not competent, – Don’t trust them, – Privacy issues– They are too busy, incur additional charges

• Ask assistant for help to retrieve it ourselves– Search for article in new location– Article not in stock: wait for new delivery– Modify search for equivalent article in old location



Handling unavailable resources: advising vs. delegating

Buyer StockSupply

StoreAssistant

StoreManager

queryfailure

queryinform

informquery

informsubscribe



The FIPA approach: summary

• It uses social interaction as a practical and scaleable technique for solving resource access problems and scaleable resource filtering & management.

• It uses standardises communication patterns

• It includes a model for knowledge sharing

• It naturally includes people



The leading Agent Standard: FIPA

Agent Communication Channel Agent Communication Channel

Agent Platform

Yellow pages White pages

Agent Platform

Yellow pages White pages

Internet, Wireless connection, etc.

Mobile Agent

Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents

16 implementations5 open source implementationsJCP called JAS70 + membersEU & other projects


Environmental Data Exchange Network – Inland Water Agent standards: a driver for scaleable agencies

• Many incompatible, proprietary agent systems exist– Used for niche opportunities, clusters of agents are unable to

communicate with each other– Difficult to scale up (e.g., across the Internet)

• Interoperability and Openness as driving forces– customers strive for simplicity and universality when accessing

multiple services– service providers can act in unison to attain a critical mass for a

sustainable customer-base

• There is a need for agent standards that standardize agent interoperability, that are public



The essence of FIPA: Scientific foundations

• A core set of communication primitives called speech acts to support universal interaction

• Sequences of speech acts practically occur in patterns called dialogues or conversations

• Ontologies are used to help capture and use semantic information during interactions

• These are interlinked

• Support for mobility is useful but optional and is domain specific



The FIPA type of agent

• Wooldridge & Jennings (1995) weak notion of agents:• Social ability: agents can communicate & collaborate• Autonomy: agents can say no (can also be commanded)• Reactive: agents perceive the environment & respond in a timely

fashion• Pro-active: agents are goal-directed, they can take the initiative.

• W & J Stronger (mentalistic) notion of agents • supported by mentalistic models of communication

• Intelligent Messenger Vs. Intelligent message– In practice often require mobility and nomadicity (intelligent

message) etc.



An agent consists of a set of objects but it is more

than that • An agent has a strong notion of

autonomy• Agents are active, they have

their own threads of control• Interact using Async. comms.

(MP)• FIPA agents support a universal

lingua franca• FIPA agents support a richer

semantic, varied communication for co-operation

• An object can be controlled externally

• Objects are passive

• Interact using Synch. comms. (MI)

• Objects use proprietary interfaces

• Objects support syntactic communication



The essence of FIPA: engineering approach

• Open Process for developing specifications

• Specifications and abstractions are technology neutral and domain neutral– E.g., message transport neutral



Where are we in EDEN-IW ?• 9 month into the project

• In June technology workshop in the US

• Proof of concept on platform independence and resource agent technology

• User agents also on different platforms



We are indebted to:• The previous and ongoing interagency

collaboration

• EDEN project

• Infosleuth and MCC

• both on concepts and ideas and philosophy



Thank you!Presenter Member Session

Chair

request

inform

query

inform

inform

inform

agree

environmental data exchange network – inland water april 2002ist-2000-29317 eden-iw1 environmental...

Documents

edeniw11 inland water

distributed environmental

environmental data ready

environmental management

data custodians databases

edeniw2 slide

data comparability info

water italian ministry