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This EDEN-IW development approach used a RAD approach to develop and demonstrate the various sub components of the complex system in cycles. The interfaces of these individual systems have been defined and tested to facilitate integration. The earlier prototypes worked with only one database without any multilingual features. They returned results in their local native Danish or French form. Gradually additional functionalities were added. The next prototype featured the integration of a second database, while later prototypes were made use of the ontology model to link heterogeneous databases. The ontology model has been previously developed independently from the software agents.
A service-orientated architecture (SOA) was adopted in the development of the system. It is a style of software architecture, which centralised on the concept of a service. A service is defined as a unit of work done by a service provider, here a software agent, to achieve desired end results for a service consumer, here a user agent, which acts on behalf of a user. Both provider and consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners. A service is a commitment between a provider and a consumer. A service description provides a greater detail of what is expected in terms of output and inputs. The main purpose of SOA is to achieve loose coupling among software agents through via simple interfaces to all participating software agents. At the agent level, this is achieved through a content language inside an agent communication language together with a common and shared ontology. The application semantics is defined inside the messages. Agents advertise their service descriptions, in other words, what service they can perform, to other agents through a directory agent.
The EDEN-IW system now features a multilingual user interface. The task agent links the user interface to relevant knowledge base and gathers results from different sources. The directory agent dynamically updates its data when new agents or resources come online. The generic resource isolates the complexity of heterogeneous databases by performing the relevant translation, conceptual mapping and SQL generation through a global interface.
Related documents :
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Agent
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Agent architecture