The agent architecture of the University of Michigan Digital Library

The University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) architecture encapsulates the many functionalities required in a digital library as a population of modular, goal-oriented, specialised `agents´. These agents participate in markets for exchanging goods and services, and team their abilities to compose complex services. Realising the UMDL agent architecture requires us to provide sound mechanisms to encapsulate functions as agents, protocols to support the evolution of teams and agent interactions through markets, and protocols to enable interoperability among library agents that are teamed. The software-engineering aspects of our effort (the tools, techniques and experiences gained) are the focus of this paper