A Mobile Agent Architecture to Support Distributed Resource Information Management

The problems of information management on a large and distributed scale have become highly apparent during the last five years. The information explosion that has taken place, particularly with the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, has shown that users treat information, especially hyperlinked information, as a valuable resource. However, the electronic information community is already showing signs of what has been commonly termed 'information overload'. This trend will continue to increase unless users are equipped with the necessary tools to allow them to mine and navigate this commodity. The current set of tools that are available to the user, whilst useful, have proven to be of limited use, due to the fact that they only individually deal with relatively small subsets of the global information available. This thesis advocates the integration of two technologies; distributed information management to provide tools to allow the user to discover, navigate and control information and mobile agent technology to allow the user to access and manage information that is distributed over large areas. It also presents a framework within which mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate the results of their activities back to the user. This framework can then be used to build mobile agents that perform user-driven tasks to fulfil distributed information management goals.