The NZDIS project: an agent-based distributed information systems architecture

Abstract

is one of six departments that make up the Division of Commerce at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems, software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported.

Communicative acts and interaction protocols in a distributed information system

“…The challenge is to provide suitable means to integrate such disparate information in a dynamic, open, and distributed environment. The New Zealand Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) [7] research platform is a FIPA-compliant multi-agent framework intended to address this problem. Multi-agent systems for the integration of distributed information have been developed previously [1]; a distinguishing feature of our approach is the use of industry standards or emerging standards such as the FIPA specifications, UML (for ontology modelling) and CORBA (for agent message transport and other data transfer).…”

Integrating environmental information: incorporating metadata in a distributed information system's architecture

“…Software interoperability is supported by encapsulating existing software tools and information sources as agents (by using a 'wrapper' layer of agent code) so that all interactions are expressed in terms of the common agent communication language. Further discussion concerning the overall merits of agent-based architectures for heterogeneous distributed information systems is provided in (Genesereth & Ketchpel, 1994;Cranefield et al 1994;Cranefield & Purvis, 1997;Purvis et al, 2000b) In this paper the discussion is primarily concerned with how the NZDIS agent-based system is designed to process environmental metadata in order to respond to queries directed across heterogeneous data sources.…”

“…Each individual agent is presumed to be a specialist for a particular task, and the expectation is that complex projects can be undertaken by a collection of agents, no one of which has the capability of performing all the required tasks of the project. An advantage of an open agent architecture like this one is that individual agents can be replaced by improved models over time, thereby enabling the system to improve gradually, grow in scope, and generally adapt to changing circumstances (Purvis et al, 2000a;Purvis et al, 2000b). Agents receive and reply to requests for services and information by means of a highlevel declarative agent communication language, such as FIPA ACL (FIPA 1998), whose message contents may be expressed in terms of formal ontologies that describe the vocabularies of various domains.…”

“…The New Zealand Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) project (Purvis et al, 2000b) seeks to address these difficulties by employing a software architecture based on a loosely coupled collection of distributed software agents. Each individual agent is presumed to be a specialist for a particular task, and the expectation is that complex projects can be undertaken by a collection of agents, no one of which has the capability of performing all the required tasks of the project.…”

Platforms for agent-oriented software engineering

“…The ZEUS [5,6,19] system toolkit, an agent-based system developed at British Telecom Laboratories, 2. JADE [2] (Java Agent DEvelopment framework), an open-source agent-based software development project at the Telecom Italia Group Company, and 3. the agent-based infrastructure associated with the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) project [22], which we will call the "NZDIS architecture".…”