WS2JADE: integrating web service with jade agents

Web services have gained popularity today for enabling universal interoperability among applications. In many scenarios, allowing software agents to access and control Web Services is important and hence the integration between these two platforms. In this paper, we focus on technical aspects of an integration framework of Web Services and Jade agent platform. The mismatch between description and communication of FIPA compliant agent platform versus Web Services are two key challenges that must be addressed. Our implementation, WS2JADE, is described and compared with WSDL2JADE---a previous implementation on the same topic, and WSIGS---a recent proposal of Web Service and Agent integration architecture. In contrast to other solutions, WS2JADE provides facilities to deploy and control Web services as agent services at run time for deployment flexibility and active service discovery.