  Traditionally, agent and web service are two separate research areas. We
figure that, through agent communication, agent is suitable to coordinate web
services. However, there exist agent communication problems due to the lack of
uniform, cross-platform vocabulary. Fortunately, ontology defines a vocabulary.
We thus propose a new agent communication layer and present the web ontology
language (OWL)-based operational ontologies that provides a declarative
description. It can be accessed by various engines to facilitate agent
communication. Further, in our operational ontologies, we define the mental
attitudes of agents that can be shared among other agents. Our architecture
enhanced the 3APL agent platform, and it is implemented as an agent
communication framework. Finally, we extended the framework to be compatible
with the web ontology language for service (OWL-S), and then develop a movie
recommendation system with four OWL-S semantic web services on the framework.
The benefits of this work are: 1) dynamic web service coordination, 2)
ontological reasoning through uniform representation, namely, the declarative
description, and 3) easy reuse and extension of both ontology and engine
through extending ontology.
