A Comparative Analysis of Web Environment Representation for Agent Adaptation
Abstract
This paper presents the results of a qualitative comparative analysis between two standardized approaches for describing Web environments: Thing Description (TD), proposed by the W3C for the Web of Things, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), an ontology-based approach. The central motivation of this work lies in the need to equip agents operating on the Web with mechanisms that allow them to autonomously and adaptively discover, interpret, and interact with Web resources, even in the face of environmental diversity and variability. To achieve this, it is essential that the environment is described in a formal and interpretable manner, enabling decoupling between agents and environment, in other words, allowing agents to discover their environment at runtime, without relying on specific or pre-configured settings. Based on this comparison, the paper discusses how the choice of a description approach influences the agents’ ability to discover and analyze resources in an adaptive and efficient manner in Web environments. The analysis paves the way for future investigations that explore hybrid approaches, reconciling operational efficiency with inference capability and scalability.
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