Building Mobile Agent-based System for Gis

A Geographic Information System (GIS) is an important distributed information resource. GIS technology is being utilized in many areas of research. Based on the concept of agent, we introduce a multi-agent architecture to develop a GIS Multi-Agent System (GISMA) that enables cooperation to assist different users to locate and retrieve spatial GIS file information in large networks. GISMA consists of two subsystems: Gathering subsystem; and Query subsystem. The Gathering Sub-System is used to collect spatial GIS file information from remote locations, and to store them in the server. The Gathering subsystem consists of many agents which have been built to locate and retrieve the necessary GIS vector/raster files information and publish the information in such a way that other agents will be able to find it and recognize its value to their user. A database is used to store the information gathered from the Gathering Sub-System agents. The Query Sub-System is used to help the user in his/her daily work with the GIS; it works as a GIS retrieval (query) tool. The Query Sub-System consists of a User Interface Agent and other agents which cooperate with each other and with the Gathering Sub-System agents to retrieve GIS information and filter the retrieved information by identifying the user’s necessities. A prototype of the GISMA system is implemented and evaluated using Java programming language and Aglet. The Aglet agent server manages mobile agents as well as stationary (static) agents. The objective is to demonstrate how the agents can cooperate to transparently locate and retrieve GIS information. © 2007 Faculty of Engineering, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. All rights reserved.