Oh! I’m very late, this quest it’s an old aspiration. I hit the “Intelligent Agents” (IA). Plenty of stuff on Google.
Goal driven, task oriented, smart, mobile, intercomunicated processes, self learners, Agents working for me, exactly. We need lots of them to create the UCI, an intelligent agent to find jobs, another one to find trip deals and so on.
Reading papers mainly of the 90′s it looked like Intelligent Agents were going to take the Internet in the near future. Beautiful concept and even more beautiful software architecture to implement them, a dream system for programers. They were very exciting years for development of theories and software. I think it was a general enthusiasm in all fields around Internet, many of them were ahead of their time and maybe IA was one of them. By what I see in their websites most of them are discontinued, strangely enough most of them were shading off around 1998.
So far I have found out three relevant currently active efforts on the field, 1. The Foundation of Physical Agent (FIPA), 2. COUGAAR an Open Source Architecture for large scale distributed multi-agent systems and 3. the impressive work of Katia Sycara at the The Intelligent Software Agents Lab of the Carnegie Mellon University.
Three of them are working for a long time now and have solutions for creating intelligent distributed agent systems. They have many answers to my questions, specially Katia Sycara and her team, have analized , proposed and developed software that could be considered the ground of the User Centric Internet (UCI).
In the paper “A Taxonomy of Middle-agents for the Internet,” Katia Sycara and Chi Wong propose the model for the Users or “Requesters” and Providers (let’s say current websites) to communicate through the Middle Agent (MA). This model fits with my view of the UCI.
In another paper called LARKS for short, Katia Sycara and colleges go much further to define a key issue: How to describe an Agent Capability for agents to understand each other of what they offer and therefore other agents know what they and how can they ask for it.
COUGAAR is extremely interesting for the solutions they offer and the understanding the show of large scale systems as it would be our case in the UCI. We can see their knowledge and experience when talking about the Yellow Pages implementation techniques for the listing of providers.
Three of the case studies I’m talking have their open source to implement multi-agent solutions.
