infonet-economy

This working paper lists some ideas on how to apply category theory to agents, and multi-agent systems. It focuses more on the distributivity and compositionality of agents, as well as on the emergence of sociality and properties, than on the intelligence or on the ability of agents to reason. It presents some categorical notions, and explains informally how they can be connected…

We present an overview of the research directions, projects and applications of the Object Systems Group.

Features specially devoted to schema evolution in the F2 object-oriented database system are presented in this paper. They include a meta-circular and reflective model where primitive operations (create, update, delete) on schema objects form a complete taxonomy of schema changes. All the schema objects of a database are updatable and the consequences of these changes on objects are…

The messenger paradigm advocates the exchange of programs called messengers between communicating hosts instead of messages. Each host contains a messenger execution environment called messenger platform. Messengers are expressed in a language understood by all the platforms. A distributed messenger environment is a collection of messenger platforms linked through an unreliable…

This technical report presents the syntax and semantics, in terms of transition system, of the messenger paradigm as it has been presented in [8]. Messengers are mobile agents able to collaborate and to coordinate their work, but are not considered as intelligent agents. More precisely, messengers are mobile codes exchanged between messenger platforms. Arriving messengers are…

The most important problem that decision makers face in today's ever increasing information flux is how to find efficiently and fast the useful information. Hypermedia Electronic Publishing systems, supporting active information distribution and offering hypertext browsing facilities, provide a promising solution to this problem. Nevertheless several issues, like value added…

In this paper, we describe a technique for integrating heterogeneous information systems using concept bases. A concept base is build on top of each system to integrate, in order to semantically enrich its description. Each concept is described at three different levels: terminological definition, formal characterization, and representation in the underlying system. The different…

This report proposes to employ messengers, initially developed in the context of communication protocols, as a fundamental component of the architecture of distributed operating systems. Current microkernels offer non-local services which require the collaboration of neighboring machines or special servers and are implemented using special protocols. These protocols are hard-wired…

The features of a database system specifically designed to support evolution are presented. The design of the F2 system has been deliberately directed toward integration of evolution features and the flexibility of structures at every level. This has leaded to an architecture where the meta-circular organization of the objects management is not an aesthetic facet but a concrete…