49 Innovative Production Machines and Systems D.T. Pham, E.E. Eldukhri and A.J. Soroka (eds) © 2008 MEC. Cardiff University, UK. Semantic Web-based agent applications  from design to collaborative deployment S. Buraga a , T. Rusu b , M. Cioca c a Faculty of Computer Science, A. I. Cuza University of Iasi, Berthelot, 16, Iasi, Romania, busaco@infoiasi.ro b P. Poni Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Ghica Voda, 41A, Iaúi, Romania, teia@tuiasi.ro c Faculty of Engineering, L. Blaga University of Sibiu, Victoriei Blv., 10, Romania, marius.cioca@ulbsibiu.ro Abstract The paper presents two original studies on using semantic Web technologies in the context of agent-oriented applications. We detail two original multi-agent platforms (Omega and ADF) and their pragmatic deployment for semantic-enriched collaboration between Web entities within an e-enterprise. Several case-studies are also provided. Keywords: Web agent, semantic Web, collaboration 1. Preamble One of the main important software technologies that can be used to accomplish the goals of Semantic Web [10, 15] is the agent-oriented technology, because Web became a distributed environment for sharing information, without concerns for its type. The information can hardly be found and processed, in a uniform and intelligent manner, by heterogeneous applications. Agent paradigm [4] is one of the promising technologies for information retrieval in general and for certain types of resource discovery in particular. Using agent-oriented distributed systems, we can divide the problem into smaller parts (objectives), which can be solved independently, thus achieving to problem modularization and robust distributed calculation. We will present two original agent-oriented systems designed and developed based on actual semantic Web technologies, in order to rigorously capture, represent and manage the knowledge available on Web. Certain case studies are also presented to explain the practical deployment of agents in the context of an e-enterprise. The paper is organized as follows. After a short presentation of semantic Web layers and actual technologies, Section 3 gives details regarding Omega, an infrastructure for agent development, providing a tree-like space of distributed objects that models the Web resources via RDF (Resource Description Framework) [23] assertions. In the Section 4, we present Agent Developing Framework (ADF), an open source agent platform, focused on collaboration and on technology and component reuse, with emphasis on real-world scenarios. Section 5 is dedicated to several case studies. First study concerns the high-level description of software agents by using RDF statements. The second case study describes an agent system built on ADF for meeting scheduling. Last section is dedicated to further research directions and the final conclusions. 2. Semantic Web  a short description According to [10], semantic Web technologies are based on the XML (Extensible Markup Language) [23]