SoFAR with DIM Agents: An agent framework for Distributed Information Management

Abstract

In this paper we present SoFAR, a versatile multi-agent framework designed for Distributed Information Management tasks. SoFAR embraces the notion of proactivity as the opportunistic reuse of the services provided by other agents, and provides the means to enable agents to locate suitable service providers. The contribution of SoFAR is to combine some ideas from the distributed computing community with the performative-based communications used in other agent systems: communications in SoFAR are based on the startpoint/endpoint paradigm, which is the foundation of Nexus, the communication layer at the heart of the Computational Grid. We explain the rationale behind our design decisions, and describe the predefined set of agents which make up the core of the system. Two distributed information management applications have been written, a general query architecture and an open hypermedia application, and we recount their design and operations.