The Purpose of Information Agents
With the growth of both Local Area Networks and of the Internet, Agents and there reletivly primitive couterparts, Search Engines, are finding a larger and larger role. The growth of networks in general slows down the productivity of those involved in the network, due to the exponential rate at which the information available multiplies (and thus the increase in effort required to find relevent information).
Agentspace is a possible answer to this complexity. Agentspace is the name given to an Information Agent, written by myself 1.
What is an Information Agent?
An Information Agent is a piece of Platform independent data which can contain information like variables, executable code, and potentially any form of data. Agentspace uses simple strings to contain variables and variable data, as well as defined compartments, such as Execution Priority, and Codespace
Data Gathering and Remote Execution
Agentspace agents are the base of a much wider system, that is provided by many other systems. The current interface to creation and modification of Agentspace is a perl5 module (called Agent). The remote execution is also provided through a perl5 module, called penguin, along with the PenguinAgent interface (a module I am writing at the moment). The transport is provided through the IO::Socket module, and a client/server based system. However, this is my system. Because of the nature of the actual Agentspace agents, any other system that is capable of splitting a string into pieces could also be used to modify Agentspace.
Portablitiy
In a system like an agent, where the idea is for the information to move around constantly, a key issue is portablity. Agentspace tackles this by removing certain issues of portablity, such as specific language dependence. Agentspace is merely a way of packing data into a tangible form. Any language that can perform uudecoding, and splitting/joining of strings is capable of providing a stable platform for any Agentspace agent.
Availability
The perl5 code needed for implementing Agentspace 2.9 is available from any CPAN 4 site, in my (JDUNCAN) ID directory. It is also available from ftp.hawk.igs.net in the directory pub/users/jduncan/Agent.
Agentspace is a royalty free concept, along with Agent (the perl5 implementation), which is distributed under the same license as perl itself.