Agentcities: A Worldwide Open Agent Network

Over the past decade, agent research has reached a significant level of maturity with wellestablished theories, languages and methodologies. Despite these successes, the vision of agents as intelligent, autonomous entities seamlessly interacting with one another in open heterogeneous environments [Hewitt90] has yet to be realised. As Nwana and Ndumu [Nwana98] point out "the devil in realising the promises of agent technology is in the details." These details include the challenging coordination, communication, discovery, trust, security and ontology issues that are found in truly open environments where agents that are owned by many different individuals and organisations can interact and interoperate.