What's new with
Agents, KQML and Knowledge Sharing
January 1996
UMBC Agent Web
- IETF draft paper:
"Service Location Protocol", J. Veizades, S. Kaplan, E. Guttman,
C. Perkins, IETF Service Location Protocol Working Group, 38
pages, 01/23/1996. Abstract:
"The service location
protocol provides a framework for the discovery and selection of
network services. It relies on multicast support at the network layer
of the protocol stack it is using. It does not specifically rely upon
the TCP/IP protocol stack but makes use of concepts that are found in
most TCP/IP protocol implementations.
Traditionally, users find services using the name of a network host (a
human readable text string) which is an alias for a network address. The
service location protocol eliminates the need for a user to know the name
of a network host supporting a service. Rather, the user supplies a set of
attributes which describe the service. The service location protocol
allows the user to bind this description to the network address of the
service.
Service Location provides a dynamic configuration mechanism for
applications in a tightly coupled set of local area networks. It is not a
global resolution system for the entire Internet, rather it is intended to
serve institutional networks with shared services.
1/24/96
- Software: TACOMA
1.1 is now available from the University of Tromsų (Norway) and
Cornell. This version now supports agents written in C as well as
Tcl/TK and provides some vital security mechanisms. Documentation on
TACOMA 1.0 is available as: Dag Johansen, Robbert van Renesse and Fred
B. Schneider: An
Introduction to the TACOMA Distributed System Version 1.0,
Technical Report 95-23. Department of Computer Science, University of
Tromsų, Norway, June 1995. 1/24/96
- Paper: SodaBot: A
Software Agent Construction System , Michael Coen, MIT AI
Lab. (600K bytes postscript) 1/23/96 .
- Software: OSF
WebWare 1.0 is a set of tools and services for building and
deploying browsing associates and Web server-based applications that
can be accessed through standard off-the-shelf browsers and
servers. The services facilitate the location, management, and use of
Web-based information and support group-related activities on the Web.
In addition to the basic Strand toolkit (formerly known as OreO until
Nabisco's lawyers noticed), a number of derived agents are available,
such as: a Personal What's New Browsing Associate, a Personal What's
Changed Proxy, a What's Changed Server Application, a Personal
LinkTree Browsing Associate, a Group Full Text Indexer Proxy, and
Group Annotation Service. The source is available free for academic,
research and internal business purposes. 1/23/96
- Paper:
Constraint Agents for the Information Age Jean-Marc Andreoli, Uwe
M. Borghoff, Remo Pareschi and and Johann H. Schlichter. ABSTRACT: We
propose constraints as the appropriate computational constructs for
the design of agents with the task of selecting, merging and managing
electronic information coming from such services as Internet access,
digital libraries, E-mail, or on-line information repositories.
Specifically, we introduce the framework of Constraint-Based Knowledge
Brokers, which are concurrent agents that use so-called _signed
feature constraints_ to represent partially specified information and
can flexibly cooperate in the management of distributed knowledge. We
illustrate our approach by several examples, and we define application
scenarios based on related technology such as Telescript and workflow
management systems. 1/22/96
- First International
Conference on Autonomous Agents Mariott Hotel, Marina del Rey,
February 5-8, 1997. 1/20/96
- Workshop: The AAAI-96 Workshop on Internet-based
Information Systems (August 4/5, 1996, Portland, Oregon) will
examine the state of the art, and explore the future, of network-based
systems for browsing, searching, and sharing information in text and
other forms with a focus on interactivity and AI techniques.
Electronic submissions are due by March 18, 1996. 1/19/96
- Dissertation: Language
Support for Mobile Agents, Fritz Knabe, Ph.D. Dissertation,
CMU. 1/19/95
- Project:
Human Computer Interaction---Intelligent Browsing Agents is an
ARPA-sponsored project at OSF whose goals include making the WWW
infrastructure agent-ready and agent-aware and providing an extensible
set of agents that access info sources, network and user knowledge in
the service of user-related objectives. 1/19/96
- Paper:
Intelligent Software Agents is a section of web pages of The Information Worker 2005
Initiative which is "an interactive site dedicated to the
exploration of the present and near future of life in the digital
world". 1/19/96
- Paper: Edward A. Fox, Electronic librarians,
intelligent network agents, and information catalogues (Draft),
1995. 1/19/96
- Bibliography: Steve Gant's
Intelligent Software Agent Bibliography contains 85 citations
with abstracts (as of 1/96). 1/19/96
- Book: Fah-Chun Cheong, Internet Agents - Spiders, Wanderers,
Brokers and Bots, New Riders, 1995. UK29 US$32. ISBN
1-56205-463-5. CONTENTS: (1) Introduction: The World of Agents; The
Internet - Past, Present, Future; WWW - Playground for Robots. (2)
Web Robot Construction: Spiders for indexing the Web; Web Robots;
HTTP: Protocol of Web Robots; WebWalker : Your Web maintenance Robot.
(3) Agents and Money on the net: Web transaction security; ECash &
Payment Services. (4) Bots in CyberSpace: Worms & Viruses; MUD Agents
and Chatterbots. (5) Appendices. 1/19/96
- Paper: Joeseph Tardo and Luis Valente. Mobile agent
security and Telescript , IEEE CompCon, 1996. 1/16/96
- Papers: There are a number of on-line papers describing the KSL Interactive Ontology
Server, including:
- J. Rice, A. Farquhar, P. Piernot, & T. Gruber.
Lessons Learned Using the Web as an Application Interface.
KSL-95-69, September 1995.
- A. Farquhar, R. Fikes, W. Pratt, & J. Rice.
Collaborative Ontology Construction for Information Integration.
KSL-95-63, August 1995.
- J. H. Gennari, D. E. Oliver, W. Pratt, J. Rice, & M. A. Musen.
A
Web-Based Architecture for a Medical Vocabulary Server.
KSL-95-41, August 1995.
- R. Fikes, R. Engelmore, A. Farquhar, & W. Pratt.
Network-based Information Brokers. KSL-95-13, January 1995.
- A. Farquhar, A. Dappert, R. Fikes, & W. Pratt.
Integrating Information Sources Using Context Logic. KSL-95-12,
January 1995.
1/16/96
- Sun Labs has built most of the concepts of Safe-Tcl into Tcl 7.5 , now
available in as an alpha release. In addition to running on PCs and
Macs (with a Motif look and feel), this new version lets you
dynamically load binaries and create additional interpreters and
execute untrusted scripts using a generalization of Borenstein's and
Rose's Safe-Tcl. Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) reports
that they have some examples of it running with a web browser and are
considering creating a Netscape Plug-in to run safe Tcl scripts (See
http://www.sunlabs.com:80/research/tcl/java.html for a discussion
of the relationship between Tcl/Tk and Java) and planning on doing
some work with Safe-Tk. 1/16/95
- Natural Intelligence is
shipping a Java development environment for the Mac named
Roaster. Cost is $399. 1/16/96
-
Agents conference list maintained by Wolfram Willuhn. 1/16/96
- CIKM-96 --
Fifth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
, November 12 - 16, 1996, Doubletree Hotel, Rockville, Maryland,
USA. 1/15/96
- AAAI
Agent Modeling Workshop , Portland, Oregon, August, 1996. Deadline
for submissions is March 18, 1996. 1/15/96
-
1st National Symposium on Parallel and Distributed AI, 25-27 July
1996, Hyderabad , India 1/15/96
- Nagendra Prasad is maintaining a page on Learning in
Multiagent Systems 1/14/96
- IEEE WET ICE
'96 -- "Collaborating on the Internet: The World-Wide Web and
Beyond", June 19-21, 1996, Stanford University. The Fifth
Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative
Enterprises (WET ICE '96) will consist of a series of parallel
workshops, each with paper presentations and working group
discussions. The workshops will focus on infrastructural issues for
collaboration in diverse application domains and will include: Web
Infrastructure for Collaborative Applications, Project Coordination,
Electronic Notebooks, Enterprise Security, Shared Design and
Prototyping Environments, Distance Learning, and Requirements
Engineering. 1/14/96
- a
Workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecoms Applications
(IATA'96) will be held as part of the 12th European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) (August 12-16, 1996, Budapest, Hungary)
1/14/96
- Ara -- Agents for
Remote Actions -- is an application-independent and
language-neutral execution platform for mobile agents written in
general interpreted languages being developed at the University of
Kaiserslautern (Germany). Agents run as portable concurrent processes
within a system core which enforces the security of their actions and
offers access to other agents and to the underlying host system. An
agent can migrate at any point of its execution and continue at the
destination place from the same state. Ara is intended as a general
system platform on top of which specific applications such as
information mining, active documents, DAI etc. can be built.
1/14/96
- Agents as Avatars? Habitats are
graphical online communities populated by avatars. OnLive! Technologies announced
the first commercial habitat which will support real-time voice
communications between multiple people in a "three-dimensional (3-D)
virtual world." They say that "Multimedia PCs equipped with standard
modems and sound cards are all that is necessary to access 3-D voice
chat. Using the OnLive! Traveler, users will navigate through
communities of 3-D environments, represented by their own 3-D
"avatars," or on-screen personas, and talk with groups of other users
in real-time." Traveler is based on the VRML standard. 1/5/96
-
NetSumm is an experimental WWW page summarizer developed by the
Language Group at British
Telecommunications Laboratories. Netsumm can highlight or abstract the
"most important" sentences of a web page to produce a summary.
1/4/96
- PostModern Computing
announced Black Widow
, an object request broker which connects CORBA objects with web
using Java. 1/4/96
- AgentNews
is a mailing list that is used to distribute periodic announcements of
new items on the UMBC agents
web. Items added to the agents news page will
be collected and a summary mailed out every two weeks or
so. 1/2/96
UMBC Agent Web
AgentWeb is maintained at the UMBC
Lab for Advanced Information
Technology by Tim
Finin (finin@umbc.edu).
Monday, 27-May-1996 18:42:14 EDT