AJAN: An Engineering Framework for Semantic Web-Enabled Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

The development of Semantic Web-enabled intelligent agents and multi-agent systems still remains a challenge due to the fact that there are hardly any agent engineering frameworks available for this purpose. To address this problem, we present AJAN, a modular framework for the engineering of agents that builds on Semantic Web standards and Behavior Tree technology. AJAN provides a web service-based execution and modeling environment in addition to an RDF-based modeling language for deliberative agents where SPARQL-extended behavior trees are used as a scripting language to define their behavior. In addition, AJAN supports the modeling of multi-agent coordination protocols while its architecture, in general, can be extended with other functional modules as plugins, data models, and communication layers as appropriate and not restricted to the Semantic Web.