This page describes the SONAT Agents ontology and supporting software
for describing, building, providing, and using persistent software agents
using
DAML+OIL.
These were originally developed to support the
SONAT
application,
but are intended to be general purpose.
DAML+OIL is
being used
with a variety of agent frameworks and infrastructures.
SONAT Agents are compatible with the
CoABS Grid
and may be accessed using the
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) from
Microsoft .NET and other platforms.
Example
Approach
We consider an agent to be a long-lived software application
that can be parameterized for an individual human user.
Agents are persistent,
i.e. they keep performing their actions until they
are cancelled by the user,
automatically restarting across system reboots etc.
Agents may maintain persistent state.
The key DAML+OIL classes
defined in
agent-ont
(dumpont)
are:
Agency- a set of related Agents working on behalf of a set of Users
AgentType- a software program that can be instantiated for a specific user
Agent- an instantiation of an
AgentType for a specific user
Parameters- specialized data values supplied to the agent at startup
Message- a specialized data structure passed among agents
PersistentState- a specialized data structure preserved across reboots
Downloads
The following files are available for download:
- agent-ont.daml
- ontology
Possible Future Directions
Related Work
soon:
FIPA,
Cougaar,
...
Author
Mike Dean
$Id: index.xml,v 1.4 2002/05/08 07:43:04 mdean Exp $
