A mobile agent architecture for distributed information management

Large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet, possess the characteristics of distributed data, distributed access and distributed control; this gives the user a powerful mechanism for building and integrating large repositories of distributed information from diverse resources. However, few support tools have been developed to allow the user to take advantage of the distributed nature of their information. To help address this problem, we advocate the integration of two technologies; distributed information management principles to allow users to create, disseminate, discover and manage their information, and mobile agent technology to provide the flexibility, scalability and dynamism necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present four principles that we have identified as being key to achieving distributed information management and an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user. We also describe a number of prototype distributed information management agents that we have developed.