Introduction

摘要

Nowadays, agent systems represent one of the more exciting research areas in Computer Science. On the one hand, they are seen by many as the next revolution in software development for large, complex, distributed systems. On the other, with the development of powerful personal devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, etc.) the vision of a personal agent - put forward by Pattie Maes in 1994 - is even more appealing. Furthermore, it can even be claimed that intelligent software agents (combined with semantic data processing) will become an essential part of Web 4.0.