AEGONE - Agent-Enabled, Grid-Oriented, and just-in-time Network of Experts

Consider a model developed by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists. This model will be used by researchers to support some scientific investigation. However, this investigation might be hampered if the researcher needs to interface (on the fly) with the members of the inter-disciplinary team responsible for the development of the model. The situation becomes more complicated if the following occurs: (a) multiple distributed models are needed for the researcher's scientific endeavor and (b) a similar need for interaction with the model-development teams arises. (As an example, consider a weather researcher who needs access to multiple weather models from different localities and each model reflects the contributions of several experts in air currents, air pressure, temperature, etc.). This paper presents an innovative integrated solution to the two problems identified above (i.e., access to multi-disciplinary team members responsible for model development and access to multiple distributed models and other data/information resources in a user-friendly transparent way) with the introduction of Agent-Enabled, Grid-Oriented Network of Expert agents (AEGONE). AEGONE is a system under development to give researchers just-in-time access to expert domain knowledge. This system will enable them to conduct scientific investigations and transparent access to distributed models and other resources without the immediate need to interface with human experts or knowledge of the complexity of the underlying grid-oriented and agent-mediated infrastructures