Abstract
It is by now a cliché that there is no one, universally accepted, definition of intelligent agent technology, but a number of loosely related techniques. Yet there are certain themes that appear common to agent-based systems, and, correspondingly, certain problems that must be addressed and overcome by all agent system builders. The aim of this paper is to briefly survey the tools and techniques that can be used to address these common issues, and that hence form a substrate for software agent systems. This paper begins with a review of agent communication languages, focusing particularly on the emerging standard known as KQML. Then a thumbnail sketch of various programming languages for building agent-based systems is presented, and there follows a discussion on support for ontologies, which allow agents to communicate using commonly defined terms and concepts. Then other computing infrastructure support for agent-based systems is considered, in particular, the use of client/server architectures and distributed object frameworks. Finally, some general comments and conclusions are presented.
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Nwana, H.S., Wooldridge, M. (1997). Software agent technologies. In: Nwana, H.S., Azarmi, N. (eds) Software Agents and Soft Computing Towards Enhancing Machine Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1198. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62560-7_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62560-7_38
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