Agent Development Support for

Tcl/Tk is an attractive language for the design of intelligent agents because it allows the quick construction of prototypes and user interfaces; new scripts can easily be bound at runtime to respond to events; and execution state is encapsulated by the interpreter, which helps in agent migration. However, a system of intelligent agents must share a common language for communicating requests and knowledge. We have integrated KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation Language), one such standard language, into Tcl/Tk. The resulting system, called TKQML, provides several beneets to those building intelligent agent systems. First, TKQML allows easy integration of existing tools which have Tcl/Tk interfaces with an agent system by using Tcl to move information between KQML and the application. Second, TKQML is an excellent language with which to build agents, allowing on-they speciication of message handlers and construction of graphical interfaces. This paper describes the implementation of TKQML, and discusses its use in our intelligent agent system for information retrieval.