RETSINA SEMANTIC WEB CALENDAR AGENT

R   E   T   S   I   N   A      A   I         T   e   c   h   n   o   l   o   g   y

Integrates RETSINA AI Technology with Microsoft Outlook
2000
Navigates the Semantic Web

Intelligent Software Agents
Laboratory
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie-Mellon University

Introduction
| Features | Schedules |
Importing |
Help
| ESecretary | Contact | Publications
| See Also | Download | History

Introduction

The Retsina Semantic Web Calendar Agent provides
interoperability between RDF based calendar descriptions on the web, and
Personal Information Manager (PIM) Systems such as Microsoft's Outlook.
Schedules and events can be described on the web in RDF, using existing
ontologies such as the Hybrid
iCal-like RDF Schema or the Dublin Core
ontology, and linked to individual's contact information described, for example,
at their home page. The Retsina Semantic Web Calendar Agent, consists of a
Distributed Meeting Scheduling Engine and the RETSINA Semantic Web Calendar
Parser. The agent assists in organising and scheduling meetings between several
individuals, and coordinates these based on existing schedules maintained by MS
Outlook.

Features

The Agent allows users to:

Schedule meetings with other users using the Agent
(Distributed Meeting Scheduling)

Browse schedules available on the Semantic Web

Import selected schedules and events into Microsoft Outlook and maintain
an accurate model of the users schedule.

Send email to attendees listed within the marked up schedules

Request and organise meetings with event attendees.

Interact with the RETSINA E-Secretary which is a Web based front end to
the RETSINA Semantic Web Calendar Agent

The Calendar Schedule markup
connects existing concepts (such as attendee details) defined across the Semantic Web, so that tools such as the
Retsina Calendar Agent can autonomously navigate the Semantic Web to colate and fuse the
relevant distributed information into a single, coherent knowledge source, and
present this knowlegde in a useful manner.

A PowerPoint
presentation is available that describes the Retsina Semantic Web Calendar
Parser and outlines some of our project goals.

Schedules

Semantic Web Schedules have many uses - for example,
marking up Conference Schedules at a Web Site (eg the Semantic Web Working Symposium), or
publishing Seminar Series or Class Schedules. Several Conference Schedules have
been (or are being) developed to date:

Pittsburgh's Three
Rivers Film Festival

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.eduprojects/RDFCalendar/2001-ThreeRiversFestival.rdf

FOIS01 Conference

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.eduprojects/RDFCalendar/FOIS01-Schedule.rdf

Trading
Agent Competition Workshop

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.eduprojects/RDFCalendar/TAC01-Schedule.rdf

WI 01 Conference (in
progress)

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.eduprojects/RDFCalendar/WI01-Schedule.rdf

SWWS
Workshop Day 1

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/content/swws2001-07-30.rdf

SWWS
Workshop Day 2

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/content/swws2001-07-31.rdf

SWWS
Workshop Day 3

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/content/swws2001-08-01.rdf

Other calendar schedule
examples are also available. For more information about the RDF Calendar
task force, visit http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/04/calendar/.

Invoking the Retsina Calendar Agent from the Web

This section demonstrates how the agent can be invoked remotely (Under
Construction...)

Browse the Trading Agent Competition Workshop
Enter your Agent Name:

Import the Trading Agent Competition Workshop into Outlook
Enter your
Agent Name:

Note, for both operations (above) you should be registered with the ANS, and
enable the import and browse settings under the Options - General tab.
See the help
pages for details

Importing Schedules into Outlook

The Retsina Calendar Agent provides support for distributed meeting scheduling,
by autonomously requesting and comparing available meeting slots from each
attendee's calendar agent, and determining the optimal meeting slot for all
attendees. Each agent has access to it's user's schedule defined within Outlook
2000, and on request, confirms which of the proposed meeting slots the user
could attend. These replies are then sent to the proposer agent, which then
determines the best meeting slot, and replies with the final meeting schedule,
which is inserted into each user's Outlook schedule and marked as tentative.

The Retsina Calendar Agent allows users to:

Request meetings with one or more individuals for a
given time slot

Request meetings with one or more individuals for some
time slot within a given period

Browse through current appointments and contacts
retrieved from Outlook

The Retsina Semantic Web Calendar Parser works
synergistically with the Retsina Calendar Agent, by
providing the agent with schedules posted on the Semantic Web and idetifying the contact
details of the attendees at the posted meetings.

Registering the Agent with a Retsina Agent Name Server
(ANS)

We are hosting a Retsina Agent Name Server on host
www.daml.ri.cmu.edu at port 6677. This ANS provides a
white-pages registry for agent name lookup. There are plans to extend calendar
agent discovery in later versions using capability description languages such as
LARKS and DAML-S.

Using the Electronic Secretary

The Electronic Secretary is a web based interface to a distributed Meeting
Scheduling Agent, that negotiates meeting requests with an RCal agent. By
clicking on the E-Secretary icon opposite, you can schedule meetings with
'DAMLUser', a fictitious user currently running the RCal Agent here at CMU.
You may be also able to schedule meetings with Rahul though his
E-Secretary Agent.

Contact

For questions and comments contact Rahul Singh.

Publications

Distributed AI, Schedules and the Semantic Web,
Rahul
Singh, Katia Sycara and Terry R. Payne

Calendar Agents on the Semantic Web,
Terry R. Payne,
Rahul Singh and Katia Sycara.
IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 17(3),
pp84-86, May/June 2002. Copyright 2002, IEEE Computer Society.
Also
appears in IEEE
Distributed Systems Online, Vol. 3(5), 2002

RCal:
A Case Study on Semantic Web Agents,
Terry R. Payne, Rahul Singh
and Katia Sycara.
Accepted for 1st Int Conf of Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems 2002.

Browsing Schedules - An Agent-based approach to navigating the
Semantic Web,
Terry R. Payne, Rahul Singh, and Katia Sycara.

International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2002, pp 469-473.

Processing Schedules using Distributed Ontologies on the Semantic
Web,
Terry R. Payne, Rahul Singh, and Katia Sycara.
Web
Services, E-Business and Semantic Web Workshop, 2002.

See Also

DMA2ICal
Translation Service / Agent.

DAML Meeting Agenda
Translation Service.

ATLAS: Agent
Transaction Language for Advertising Services.

DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)
Site.

Download the Agent

These tools were developed as research prototypes and hence
are available "as-is" with no warranty of any kind, express or implied

The RETSINA Calendar Agent runs on Windows 2000 and Windows
XP and requires MS outlook 2000 or Outlook XP.

Download the executable for Windows Platforms

Questions? Comments?
Problems? Please address them to [email-masked]