SoFAR: An Agent Framework for Distributed Information Management

SoFAR, the Southampton Framework for Agent Research, is a versatile multi-agent framework designed for Distributed Information Management tasks. SoFAR embraces the notion of proactivity as the opportunistic reuse of the services provided by other agents, and provides the means to enable agents to locate suitable service providers. The contribution of SoFAR is to combine ideas from the distributed computing community with the performative-based communications used in other agent systems: communications in SoFAR are based on the startpoint/endpoint paradigm, a powerful abstraction that can be mapped onto multiple communication layers. SoFAR also adopts an XML-based declarative approach for specifying ontologies and agents, providing a clear separation with their implementation. We explain the rationale behind our design decisions; we describe two distributed information management applications and we recount their design and operations.