Intelligent Agents

To gauge how " hot " a technology is, try pinning down a definition that covers all the players and products that claim to implement it. For a cutting-edge technology like intelligent agents, you'll come up with a grab bag: Beyond a germ (or two) of commonality among the definitions where all or most of the candidates agree, many products and research efforts take fundamental agent concepts and properties in widely divergent directions. " The term agent is used to represent two orthogonal concepts. The first is the agent's ability for autonomous execution. The second is the agent's ability to perform domain oriented reasoning. " This definition, from Sankar Virdhagriswaran of agent technology company Crystaliz Inc., is a good starting point but can be expanded in certain areas. First, an agent executes; it acquires input and produces output. Agent processing is domain-oriented: An agent " knows " about certain concepts, data structures, rules, and interfaces but is not necessarily capable of interpreting information outside its field. An agent also " reasons " by encapsulating rules that allow it to transform conditions into decisions. And it operates autonomously by virtue of being persistent and capable of operating in a changing environment. So far, our definition of an intelligent agent applies equally well to travel agents, to many industrial robots, and to software agents. But it's software, of course, that interests us here rather than robot hardware or human " wetware "-database-related software in particular. This article will introduce software-agent technology and concentrate specifically on ways that agents add value to database-related processes such as knowledge discovery and other forms of data analysis, profiling and search, and reporting. In the database realm, much or even most of the relevant work is being done not with mainstream relational database management systems but rather with specialized DBMSs that manage analytical data and unstructured information like text, images, and multimedia Web content. Agents are also able to encapsulate pattern-recognition algorithms and rules-based processing systems that make them a potentially ideal tool for