Mobile and cooperative compounds of multimedia services

This work proposes a novel model where multimedia contents with their related services (business processes and functions) are packaged together as mobile agents. This is intended to enable content providers both to encapsulate their contents and to provide value-added services, for flexible content editing, delivery, and presentation. In addition, agents encapsulating contents/services can contain other agents in themselves (synthesis of agents). A mobile agent compound integrating multiple contents/services can be thus dynamically formed, in which multiple agents work cooperatively and migrate together as a unit. This paper also describes our proposed MAFEH/WS framework for the model. Agents in the model can be developed by incorporating simple parameter settings for synthesis control into business process descriptions in BPEL4WS.