Agent, CORBA, and the WWW: A Foundation for Open Systems Interconnectivity

The proposed innovation of this Phase I is to combine three distinct and complementary technologies to create a flexible, powerful, and extensible infrastructure for interconnecting heterogeneous sources of data. Autonomous agents will perform network management and administrative duties, and provide customized services to end users of the network. The agents will operate with a CORBA-based integration backbone and WWW-based clients. CORBA is a distributed object management framework that has been increasingly adopted by both government and private projects where large-scale distributed systems are needed. It provides distributed services (e.g. security and namespace management) and facilitates the integration of legacy applications and databases. WWW offers a low-cost client mechanism to distribute data and services. Both are based on open standards and have extensive commercial support. Agents will provide the automation necessary to manage, maintain, and extend a large-scale network composed of disparate and separated sites. Without autonomous agent technology, the shear amount of work needed to process content and manage the network would make this problem intractable. Agents will also make the system easily extensible, allowing the insertion of new capability by creating new agents. Combined, these technologies provide a firm base and a clear path for system evolution.