What Is an Agent?
Mobile Agents
Programs that move among computer hosts
Autonomous Agents
Based on planning technologies
Learning Agents
User preferences, collaborative filtering,...
Animated Interface Agents
Simulation-based Entities
Data/Info finding, filtering and merging
Cooperative Agents
Cooperation among distributed
heterogeneous programmatic components
Notes:
Many very different types of technologies have made use of the term “agent” to describe themselves. The OAA belongs to the class known as “cooperative” or “distributed agents”, and can be thought of as a more powerful extension of “distributed object” frameworks such CORBA or DCOM. As you will see, OAA agents possess a number of features beyond distributed objects: a higher-level interface specification, an interagent communication language which can be translated to and from human natural language, and the ability to proactively monitor the state of the environment and autonomously take action based on various types of events.