The NZDIS Project: An Agent-based Distributed Information Systems Architecture

This paper describes an architecture for building distributed information systems from existing information resources, based on software agent and distributed object technologies. An agent-based architecture is used, with messages exchanged via the FIPA agent communication language (ACL). Novel features of this system include the use of standards from the object-oriented programming community such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) (as a communications infrastructure), the Unified Modeling Language (used as an ontology representation language), the Object Data Management Group’s Object Query Language (used for queries) and the Object Management Group’s Meta Object Facility (used as the basis for an ontology repository agent). ‘Stringified’ object references may be returned as the content of ACL messages, allowing query results to be made available via a variety of CORBA interfaces.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Martin K. Purvis, Stephen Cranefield, Geoff Bush, Daniel Carter, Bryce McKinlay, Mariusz Nowostawski, Roy Ward
• Keywords: Biometrics, Common Object Request Broker Architecture, HICSS 2000, Object Data Management Group, Object Query Language