SAGE and Its Application to Inter-company EC

We are doing research under the SAGE (Smart AGent Environment) project on seamless integration of information distributed over networks like the Internet. We avail ourselves of conversational agents speaking ACL (Agent Communication Language) as an enabling technology for such use of distributed information. We have applied SAGE to an inter-company EC (Electronic Commerce) prototype, which is planned to be deployed for real services. We have named this prototype SAGE:Francis. Through the application process, we have agenti ed legacy software like database management systems (DBMSs) as database agents and also agenti ed users as user agents into SAGE. Then we put mediator agents called facilitators to help the interoperation through ACL messages between these agents. We have identi ed useful functions of facilitators and implemented some of them. With the agenti cation and functions of facilitators, we have made it possible to integrate separate and disperse databases using di erent ontologies (terminologies). We report, in this paper, inter-company EC as an application area for SAGE, identi ed functions of facilitators, implementations of the agents, the internal workings of the system and its performance.