The mobile agent technology to support and to access museum information
Paolo Bellavista, Antonio Corradi, Andrea Tomasi · 2000
The global scenario put together by communication networks determines new opportunities towards the realization of Internet-based distributed services in many complex and composite application areas, such as the access to museum information. Solution complexity mainly stems from the heterogeneous representation formats of data, their geographical distribution, the large number of data sources involved, and the user requirements for personal customization and optimization of the accessed services. The paper claims that the realization of flexible museum information access services require a middleware-level approach and the implementation of a distributed support infrastructure. Within the MOSAICO project, we have realized the VM (Virtual Museum) framework on top of the SOMA (Secure and Open Mobile Agent) programming environment. Mobile agents have been chosen for their intrinsic properties of autonomy, asynchronicity, dynamicity of distribution, and adaptability to available system resources. We have designed the VM to accommodate different usage scenarios: VM users can play different roles with different expertise levels; they can ask the VM infrastructure for differently complex features, from simple Web accessibility to user accounting for data resource consumption, from data customization via user profiling to automatic update of subscripted query results. The first prototype, apart from the feasibility of the approach, has already shown the potential and the flexibility of the mobile agent infrastructure to adapt to both different user requirements and different resource availability.