”Campus” - an Agent-based Platform for Distance Education

Campus supports the communication and co-operation between a distance teaching university and its students in an Internet environment. While students usually connect quite rarely to the Internet, they can continuously be represented in the Internet by their individual autonomous agents which can fulfil a variety of tasks for their owners. Campus is being implemented with the help of the Agent Application Programming Interface (AAPI) package. AAPI is an extension of the Java Class Hierarchy and has been developed at the University of Hagen; it supports the design and implementation of systems of mobile, autonomous agents and is based upon decentralised control structures. Derived from the AAPI package, Campus offers a variety of Campus Intercommunication Agents.