VIVA Knowledge-Based Agent Programming

We sketch VIVA, a new agent-oriented programming language based on the theory of VIVid Agents presented in [Wag96a]. VIVA follows the AOP paradigm of [Sho93] but is, in a sense, more conservative by adopting as many concepts as possible from SQL and Prolog. This concerns, e.g., the distinction between the schema and the state of an agent, or the use of facts and rules with negation-as-failure, logical variables and uni cation. The basic design principles of VIVA are conservativity, scalability, and versatility.