CONCEPT
Three motivating issues have guided research and development:
- re-personalizing disembodied data
- time management
- multiple interfaces to shared information space
These issues are being addressed through design and implementation of an agent based
software called the "Information Personae."
An Information Persona (IPersonae, IP) is best described as a set of tools and interfaces for the dynamic construction, distribution,
querying, and rendering of an "embodied" collection of information. The IP can be broken down into several components,
which collectively provide the sets of tools and interfaces for community members. These components will handle three tasks:
1) content management; 2) mobile agent brokering; and 3) dynamic view generation. The IP bypasses traditional notions of client
and servers, by containing the capabilities of both, allowing for decentralization of computing resources via mobile or transportable
agents, a convenient paradigm for distributed computing since they hide the communication channels but not the computational
location. Through this architecture, powerful content-centered communities can form, providing a dynamic infrastructure
which facilitates collaboration and communication.
A Mobile Agent Management (MAM) system has been created to support the design
requirements of the general architecture for the Information Personae. Important characteristics of the MAM system include:
- Java-based for cross-platform applications
- distributed and decentralized
- extensible and modular framework for future developers
- non-proprietary and open-sourced
The generic architecture will support localization across three testbed projects, two of
which (PROXY and TIME) have been actively used for prototyping activities.
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