In this paper we propose a programming model and the supporting technologies for designing and programming Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) in the perspective of Multi-Agent Systems and agent oriented paradigms. In particular, the approach is meant to be useful for the design and programming of complex service-oriented systems, by providing first-class design tools to implement challenging features of nextcoming service applications.
Indeed, besides autonomy, loose-coupled interactions, openness, flexibility, etc., the proposed design model promotes:
(\textit{i}) the use of a strong notion of agency, thus agents that can be defined along their mental attitudes to be fully autonomous systems, with pro-active and goal oriented abilities with respect of the achievement of their tasks;
(\textit{ii}) the definition artifact based work environments where agents are meant to work and interact, thus enabling intelligent and cognitive agents to co-use, expose and manage web service technologies in a suitable functional fashion by the mean of special artifact based infrastructures.
Besides describing the basic concepts underlying the agent and artifact programming model for web services, a developing platform called CArtAgO-WS.
is introduced along with a describing example explored to show the approach in practice.