Extending Loosely Coupled Federated Information Systems Using Agent Technology

Different FIPA-compliant agent development platforms are available for developing multiagent systems. FIPA compliance ensures interoperability among agents across different platforms. Although most agent implementation platforms provide some form of white- and yellow-page functionalities to advertise and identify agent roles and descriptions, there are no clear architectural standards that define how an agent community can effortlessly adapt to operate in a federated information system (FIS) where new content sources are constantly added or changes are made to existing content sources. This article presents a framework based on the semantic Web vision to address extensibility in a loosely coupled FIS.