The Mobile Agent Paradigm Meets Digital Document Technology: Designing for Autonomous Media Collection

  • Authors:

  • Benjamin Falchuk;Ahmed Karmouch

  • Affiliations:

  • Multimedia Information Research Laboratory and Agent Group, University of Ottawa, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 161 Louis Pasteur, Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1N 6N5. Email: ben@sol.ge ...;Multimedia Information Research Laboratory and Agent Group, University of Ottawa, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, 161 Louis Pasteur, Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1N 6N5. Email: karmouch@s ...

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Mobile agents have emerged as a new paradigm for computing andare proving to be more flexible and dynamic than the averageclient in the client-server model. In the mobile agent modelthe program is sent to, and runs on, the remote machine,thereby operating closer to and more interactively with theremote document resource. While for the most part industry iscurrently cautious, research laboratories have embraced theconcept and effective prototypes have emerged. AgentSys is onesuch mobile agent system developed by the Agent Group at theMultimedia Information Research Laboratory [26]. This prototypeimplements the protocols (AgenTask, AgenTransact, AgenTransfer)necessary to allow agents to autonomously roam around a networkof digital resources, collect information intermittently, andreturn to the user with results. While both network bandwidthand user search time can be reduced using the mobile agentparadigm, such a system requires protocols at the agentlanguage, ontology, transfer, and application levels. Thispaper proposes: (i) an agent-stack to enable a mobile agentsystem, (ii) the agent protocols necessary for agent-digitaldocument interaction, (iii) a profound new way of thinking ofdocuments within the mobile agent paradigm, and (iv) solutionsto critical issues in mobile agent transfer and taskspecification as they relate to autonomous digital documentcollection. This includes both the transfer of multimedia mobileagent cargo and novel techniques for the specification of agentbehavior within the document task. A brief quantitative analysisof the Web surfing paradigm versus the mobile agent paradigm isincluded to justify claims of network traffic savings usingagents.