Personal access to a worldwide agent network

Abstract

This paper presents The Pagoda of Creation, a general web-based system for automatic creation of Personal Assistants for a worldwide agent network. Our vision is an agent network, as widespread as the WWW, and as easy to access as launching a browser in a laptop.Agent networks will be more intelligent than the current Internet but they risk being used only by specialised users. In fact, in order to access the Web, the user just needs to use a browser. But if s/he wants to interact with an agent network, s/he will need personal assistant agents (PA). Undoubtedly, writing a PA does require highly specialised software skills.The Pagoda of Creation is an intelligent web-based system runnable from any browser that easily creates personal assistant agents that will enable non-specialized users to have access to networked societies of agents operating in diverse domains. The created Personal Assistants may have web-based user interfaces (among other possibilities), personalised for the user and for the chosen application domain.Personal Assistants will be created from a database of agent templates for a diverse range of application types, accurately described using well-established modelling and representation languages. An agent template contains a model of the application domain, a formal interface specification, a description of the top-level control flow, and decision knowledge.Developers of new agent network application types will provide PA templates for their application types. These templates can be generated using interface tools also provided by the described Web-system.