Intelligent Agents and Semantic Web Services: Friends or Foes?

Some controversial approaches have derived from the discussion about the scope of the well-established Multiagent Systems technology, and the functionality expected from the ever-evolving Web Services technology. While some authors in the field of intelligent agents state that Semantic Web Services can be also viewed as services provided by agents distributed all over the Internet using semantic mark-up, others believe that the agent functionality can be integrated in the core of intelligent Web Services. A converging trend claims that the next generation Web will be integrated by both agents and Web services working seamlessly. In this work, we establish a set of parameters within three different dimensions, namely, general issues, matureness level, and applicability, by means of which these technologies can be evaluated and compared. From the results of this study we conclude that both technologies are completely interoperable and the strength of their union depends on the way it is achieved.