UMBC ebiquity
Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents
Agent Communication
September 19, 1997
A software agent is an autonomous, goal-directed process that (1) is aware of and reacts to its environment and (2) cooperates with other agents to accomplish its task. This cooperation is the key to realizing the potential of the agent paradigm, and cooperation can only be achieved through effective agent-agent communication.
- How do agents communicate? There are four levels at which agents can communicate: (1) object sharing - shared objects, procedure calls and data structures; (2) knowledge sharing - shared facts, rules, constraints, procedures and knowledge; (3) intentional sharing - shared beliefs, plans, goals and intentions; and (4) experiential sharing - shared experiences and strategies. KQML (combined with KIF and appropriate ontologies) is an example of knowledge sharing. It is described further in the slides.
- Communicating mobile agents? There has been no serious integration of the mobile-agent and software-agent paradigm, but there appear to be no immediate deep issues (an initial integration of TKQML and Dartmouth's Agent Tcl has already been done). A key practical issue, however, is developing protocols for finding other agents and forwarding messages to an agent's current location.
- What should agents communicate about? The Web! The SHOE system has two main components: (1) semantic markup tags that Web authors can use on their web pages and (2) "URL agents" that understand small groups of related web pages (and communication with other agents with similar pages). Other agents can ask the URL agents questions about their web pages (via KQML).
Presentation slides
Dartmouth College
Presentation from the Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents, held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH on September 19-20, 1997.
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