In 2001, two distinct revolutionary approaches to distributed system integration and web content diffusion were proposed: Autonomic Computing and the Semantic Web. These approaches are currently two of the most active research fields in the information technology area. After three years, many common themes came out: while Autonomic Computing research is focused on providing ways to define "self-surviving" systems, the Semantic Web struggles to define web content semantics producing complex and distributed services on the Internet. In a sense, the first area approaches systems defining the "internal, operational knowledge", while the second defines the knowledge about the environment into which software entities and humans should cohabit.

This paper lies in the convergence of the two approaches and proposes an agent-based system able to semantically characterize and search a set of web resources, and to maintain and update its knowledge base by means of monitoring sensors and interaction with external web services. First experimental results confirm the validity of the combined approach in terms of search recall, thanks to autonomous update of covered topics.