An architecture, and the accompanying infrastructural support, for agent-based software developement is described which supports the use of agent-oriented ideas at multiple levels of abstraction. At the lowest level are ...

The use of intelligent software agents is a modelling paradigm that is gaining increasing attention in the applications of distributed systems. This paper identifies essential characteristics of agents and shows how they ...

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as a formalism for defining an abstract syntax for Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) and their associated content languages. It describes an approach ...

Ontologies play an important role in defining the terminology that agents use in the exchange of knowledge-level messages. As object-oriented modelling, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in particular, have built up ...

In FIPA-style multi-agent systems, agents coordinate their activities by sending messages representing particular communicative acts (or performatives). Agent communication languages must strike a balance between simplicity ...

This paper describes an architecture for building distributed information systems from existing information resources, based on distributed object and software agent technologies. This architecture is being developed as ...

Agent-oriented software engineering is a promising new approach to software engineering that uses the notion of an agent as the primary entity of abstraction. The development of methodologies for agent-oriented software ...

The increasing availability and variety of large environmental data sets is opening new opportunities for data mining and useful cross-referencing of disparate environmental data sets distributed over a network. In order ...

The process for requirements elicitation has traditionally been based on textual descriptions or graphical models using UML. While these may have worked for the design of desktop-based systems, we argue, that these notations ...

The use of modelling abstractions to map from items in the real-world to objects in the computational domain is useful both for the effective implementation of abstract problem solutions and for the management of software ...