Speaker: Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.
Date: Thursday 19th March 1998
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Place: Room 418, Huxley Building
Abstract

Currently we are rigorously working on our agent system for the deployments scheduled next April. I will give the recent development of our system in addition to the content of the following PAAM98 presentation.
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PAAM98 Abstract
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We are doing research under the SAGE (Smart AGent Environment) project on seamless integration of information distributed over networks like the Internet. We avail ourselves of conversational agents speaking ACL (Agent Communication Language) as an enabling technology for such use of distributed information. We have applied SAGE to an inter-company EC prototype, which is planned to be deployed for real services. We have named this prototype SAGE:Francis.

Through the application process, we have agentified legacy software like database management systems (DBMSs) as database agents and also agentified users as user agents into SAGE. Then we put mediator agents called facilitators to help the interoperation through ACL messages between these agents. We have identified useful functions of facilitators and implemented some of them. With the agentification and functions of facilitators, we have made it possible to integrate separate and disperse databases using different ontologies (terminologies).

We report, in this paper, inter-company EC as an application area for SAGE, identified functions of facilitators, implementations of the agents, how the system works and its performance.