An Inference Engine-Based Subscription Service

A Distributed Network Architecture (DNA) forms the basis of many decisionsupport systems available today. Such architecture excels at providing an application environment rich in transparency, performance, and expandability (Gray and Lievano 1997). However, efforts at the Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center in San Luis Obispo, California have found that for this architecture to be successfully applied to agent-based, decision-support systems two additional ingredients must be present, namely a query service and a subscription service. These two mechanisms support the extensive collaboration inherent in agent-based, decision-support systems. Although primarily utilized as a means of agent-to-agent interaction these two services can be employed by any collaborator, including users.