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Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 A New Electronic Information Age

1.2 The Reality of the Current Electronic Information Age

1.3 The Challenge for Distributed Information Management

1.4 Agents of Change

1.5 Overview

2.1 The Nature of Distribution of Resources

2.2 Distributed Information Systems

2.3 Distributed Resource Locators

2.3.1 Archie

2.3.2 Wide Area Information Server

2.3.3 Gopher

2.4 Distributed Hypermedia

2.4.1 World Wide Web

2.4.2 Hyper-G

2.4.3 Microcosm: The Next Generation

2.5 Distributed Information Management

2.5.1 Resource Discovery

2.5.2 Information Integrity

2.5.3 Navigation Assistance

2.5.4 System Integration

2.6 Summary

3.1 What is an Agent?

3.2 Notions of Agency

3.2.1 A Weak Notion for Describing Agents

3.2.2 A Stronger Notion for Describing Agents

3.2.3 Intelligence and Learning

3.2.4 Other Attributes of Agents

3.2.5 Summary

3.3 The Differing Views on Agents

3.3.1 The Traditional Agent

3.3.2 The Interface Agent

3.3.3 The Information Agent

3.3.4 The Distributed Agent

3.4 Summary

4.1 The Mobile Agent Paradigm

4.2 Characteristics of Mobile Agents

4.2.1 Migration

4.2.2 Data Acquisition

4.2.3 Route Determination

4.2.4 Communication

4.3 A Survey of Mobile Agent Systems

4.3.1 Agent TCL

4.3.2 TACOMA

4.3.3 Telescript

4.3.4 An HTTP-Based Infrastructure for Mobile Agents

4.3.5 Conclusions

4.4 Summary

5.1 Requirements

5.1.1 Arbitrary Migration

5.1.2 Persistence

5.1.3 Fault Tolerance

5.1.4 Agent Communication Language

5.1.5 Communication

5.1.6 Heterogeneity

5.1.7 Security

5.1.8 Summary

5.2 The Framework

5.2.1 Domain Agent

5.2.2 Resource Agent

5.2.3 Mobile Agent

5.2.4 User Interface Agent

5.2.5 Gateway Agent

5.3 Summary

6.1 Framework Implementation

6.1.1 Agent Framework Architecture

6.1.2 Agent Programming Language

6.1.3 Agent Communication Language

6.2 Distributed Information Management Agents

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