Infrastructure for web services that perform automated reasoning

Despite much research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Agents (IA) over the past few
years little 'intelligent' behaviour is displayed by modern computer systems. AI planning and intelligent
systems are failing to be generally used. The intellectual abilities such as learning, analysing, problem
solving, planning and abstracting are features that we do not entirely associate with today’s computer
systems.

In AI we recognise that although machines are beginning to overtake the human brain in terms of
sheer processing power and perhaps storage capacity, they still cannot approach the level of human
intelligence in terms of general purpose cognitive capability. Part of the reason for this is that software
technology that supports general intelligent processes is difficult to use, understand and maintain.

With the advent of the Internet, the Web as we know it is an enormous collection of information stored
in a variety of formats and held loosely together by hyperlinks. This is adequate for humans who are
able to understand natural languages, but it is of no use if we want machines to be able to process as
well as understand the information. To deal with this issue, the next Web generation promise to deliver
Semantic Web Services; services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery,
composition and choreography. They can be utilised by application or other services without human
assistant or protocols; where information is encoded according to well defined vocabularies, often
known as Ontologies. In this research, we aim to create the infrastructure to enable intelligent software
to be recast as semantic web services, and lead the way to “Service Oriented Intelligence” –
distributed software intelligence using the Internet.