Autonomous Semantic Web services

The Web is a collection of human-readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs. While the Web emerged as a global repository of digitized information, this very information is, by and large, unavailable for automatic computation. Two parallel efforts have emerged in recent years that could overcome this paradox: the Semantic Web is providing tools for explicit markup of Web content, and Web services could create a network in which programs act as independent agents that produce and consume information, enabling automated business transactions. The DARPA Agent Markup Language for Services (DAML-S) provides a mechanism that begins to bridge the gap between the Web services infrastructure and the Semantic Web.