8.16.1 Mobile agent brokering enables the creation of agents free to move about the network and the management and assignment of tasks for those agents. The emphasis here is not on the intelligence (Turing, 1950; Maes, 1994a, 1994b) or personification (Laurel, 1997) of agents, but their ability to autonomously and asynchronously fulfil specific tasks assigned to them, exploring the notion that ongoing interaction does not necessarily require or even benefit from ongoing communication. These mobile agents will also facilitate the building of communities of users by efficiently and transparently transporting content throughout the network. Since this will be a multi-agent system, we plan to make use of the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML). The language was designed to transmit object-oriented data and provide a means for programs to communicate attitudes about information such as querying, stating, believing, requiring, achieving, subscribing, and offering (KQML Specification, 1996).

8.16.2 Our sample participant has now accessed an Information Persona via two interfaces: standard email messaging and the World Wide Web. In this scenario, a second participant in the History of Art and Computing testbed is accessing an IP through a VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language Standard, 1997) or Java (Sun,1995) view. On the monitor is a multidimensional visualisation of the last several hundred email messages posted from a favourite mailing list. One message stands out in particular, since it is linked to the other active IP. The participant using the VRML/Java view zooms into a spatialised representation of the current public space. The same content constructed via the email interface is now being displayed as an explorable terrain of multimedia information. The two participants notice each other's presence, each represented by an "avatar," appropriate to their particular modal connection. Because both are short on time, they decide not to communicate directly. Instead, they continue to explore the public space being dynamically generated by each other's IPs.

MamX

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