The NZDIS project: an agent-based distributed information systems architecture

Describes the initial design work of the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) research project, which seeks to develop an architecture for building distributed information systems from existing information resources, based on software agent and distributed object technologies. An agent-based architecture is used, with messages exchanged via the FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) agent communication language (ACL). Novel features of this system include the use of standards from the object-oriented programming community, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as a communications infrastructure, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which is used as an ontology representation language, the Object Data Management Group´s Object Query Language (OQL), which is used for queries, and the Object Management Group´s Meta Object Facility (MOF), which is used as the basis for an ontology repository agent. ´Stringified´ object references may be returned as the content of ACL messages, allowing query results to be made available via a variety of CORBA interfaces.