Agent-based Integration of General-Purpose Tools
Stephen Cranefield, Martin Purvis · 1996
Agent-Based Software Integration (ABSI) entails the development of intelligent soft-ware agents and knowledge-sharing protocols that enhance interoperability of multiple software packages. Although some past ABSI projects reported in the literature have been concerned with the integration of relatively large software frameworks from separate engi-neering disciplines, the discussion in this paper concerns the integration of general-purpose software utilities and hand-crafted tools. With such smaller-scale ABSI projects, it may be difficult to justify the expense of constructing an overall ontology for the application. There are cases, however, when the project involves general-purpose tools that manipulate the same general entity types (such as files) but at different levels of abstraction. In such cases it is appropriate to have ontologies appropriate for the general usage of each tool and constraint descriptions that enable the ontological specifications to be mapped across the various levels of abstraction. This paper discusses issues associated with this type of ABSI project and describes an example information management application associated with university course administration. For the information management application presented the key issues are the provision of standard agent wrappers for standard desktop infor-mation management tools and the design of standard ontologies describing information stored in relational databases as well as in structured text files. Examples of a conceptual model describing such a database ontology are presented in connection with the example application. It also suggested that a general planning agent, distinct from the notion of a facilitator agent, be employed in this context to assist in the use of various agents to manipulate information and move items from one data format to another. 1