Section 6 gives our conclusions. Our architecture is illustrated in Figure 1. It consists of agents communicating with facilitators, plus other components, such as data sources and user interfaces, that interact with the collection of agents and facilitators. KIF is powerful enough to contain or to encapsulate any other content language, so that any information may be obtained from the information source, translated to the desired format, and transmitted to the requester, assuming the necessary components exist. Each Facilitator in our architecture acts as a broker.
Facilitators perform routing, reasoning, and translation.
A facilitator stores agent-provided advertisements of coverage in a knowledge base along with relevant ontologies. The facilitator uses these advertisements to determine which agents can support a particular request. And it translates requests into the language and terminology used by each responding agent and also translates responses into the language and terminology used by the requesting agent. A facilitator will decompose requests requiring action by multiple agents and then compose the responses for the requester. Product data is stored in databases, for easy search and maintenance.