MANTHA: Agent-Based Management of Hypermedia Documents

We present an open architecture for the authoring publishing and archiving of hypermedia docu ments on the Internet The multi agent approach is adopted and provides solutions to design a new software layer on top of the Internet protocol suite We propose an agent model with the requirements of autonomy social ability reactivity and pro activeness An agent template JAMES has been developed using JAVA and KQML as the agent communication language On this basis an agency is proposed and designed according to a federated model The architecture is domain independent but a prototype application has been designed in the Telepathology domain The user is given an integrated set of services based on a structure model of the clinical case i e the document as well as metadata representation techniques Results of the prototype imple mentation are presented and discussed