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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.
OSF Proxy Web Server Tools
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.
These tools were developed under the Human Computer Interaction---Intelligent Browsing Agents project. Its 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.
IETF Draft on Service Location
A new IETF draft paper on locating services may be of interest: "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.
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.
"SodaBot: A Software Agent Construction System" , Michael Coen, MIT AI Lab. (600K bytes postscript)
"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.
"Language Support for Mobile Agents", Fritz Knabe, Ph.D. Dissertation, CMU.
"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".
Edward A. Fox, "Electronic librarians, intelligent network agents, and information catalogues" (Draft), 1995.
Steve Gant's "Intelligent Software Agent Bibliography" contains 85 citations with abstracts (as of 1/96).
Fah-Chun Cheong has written a book "Internet Agents - Spiders, Wanderers, Brokers and Bots" published by New Riders, 1995. UK29 US$32. ISBN 1-56205-463-5. Its contents include: (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. [an error occurred while processing this directive]