Research - Overview

My research focus is on the use of knowledge by agents to support service discovery, provision and use. Much of my earlier work in this area included the development of the OWL-S ontologies with the other members of the OWL-S coalition, as well as the use of the OWL-S profile for service discovery. More recently, my focus has been on the notion of Agent capabilities as services; how they are described, how they are provisioned and how they could affect agent self-organization based on perceived community demand for services or based on coalition formation. I’ve also explored the use of service discovery and data harmonisation for Semantic Web Services within Grid environments.

Much of this work has lead to an investigation into how knowledge is engineered, aligned, and shared autonomously between agents, Agentic AI and intelligent services, in smart-service rich environments such as automated scientific labs (in collaboration, for example, with CSols, Unilever and Astech Solutions) in collaboration with Dr Valentina Tamma, and more recently Dr Jacopo de Berardinis as part of the Knowledge Engineering Group.

My other research interests include the use of agents in pervasive systems, from discovery of devices, through to the use of awareness for service provision, and the inclusion of LLMs within the Knowledge Engineering lifecycle. I’ve also worked with others on the use of knowledge in pedagogy, recommender systems and their use of deep learning for prediction, supporting bibliometrics, pervasive social networking, and ontological image description.