An information agent is viewed as a deductive database consisting of 3 parts: an observation database containing the facts the agent has observed or sensed from its surrounding environment, an input database containing the information the agent has obtained from other agents, and an intensional database which is a set of rules for computing derived information from the information stored in the observation and input databases. Stabilization of a system of information agents represents a capability of the agents to eventually get correct information about their surrounding despite unpredictable environment changes and the incapability of many agents to sense such changes causing them to have temporary incorrect information. We argue that the stabilization of a system of cooperative information agents could be understood as the convergence of the behavior of the whole system toward the behavior of a "superagent", who has the sensing and computing capabilities of all agents combined. We show that unfortunately, stabilization is not guaranteed in general, even if the agents are fully cooperative and do not hide any information from each other. We give sufficient conditions for stabilization and discuss the consequences of our results.
In this paper communications for agents are based on push-technologies. It is interesting to see how the results could be extended to multiagent systems whose communication is based on pull-technologies ( @cite_10 , @cite_9 ).
@cite_9 @cite_10
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With the ever growing usage of the world wide IT networks, agent technologies and multiagent systems (MAS) are attracting more and more attention. Multiagent systems are designed to be open systems, wheras agent technologies aim at the design of agents that perform well in environments that are not necessarily well-structured and benevolent. Emergent system behaviour is one of the most interesting phenomena one can investigate in MAS. However, there is more to MAS design than the interaction between a number of agents. For an effective system behaviour we need structure and organisation. This paper presents basic concepts of a theory for holonic multiagent systems with the aim to define the building blocks of a theory that can explain organisation and dynamic reorganisation in MAS. In doing so it tries to bridge the well-known micro-macro gap in MAS theories. The basic concepts are illustrated with three application scenarios: flexible manufacturing, order dispatching in haulage companies, and train coupling and sharing. Several methodologies are supplied to multiagent system designers to help them defining their agents and their multiagent systems. These methodologies focus mainly on agents and on multiagent systems and barely consider how to design interaction protocols. A problem could emerge of this lack since interaction protocols are more and more complex. The aim of this article is to present our proposal of interaction protocol engineering which is based on the communication protocol engineering [10]. Interaction protocol engineering allows designers to define protocols from scratch. Our proposal is composed of five stages: analysis, formal description, validation, protocol synthesis and conformance testing. Scholars are increasingly citing electronic “web references” which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To “webcite” a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its “instructions for authors” accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) “prospectively” before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted “citing articles” (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics. @PARASPLIT [J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60] In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text.