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MASIF: The OMG mobile agent system interoperability facility

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Abstract

MASIF is a standard for mobile agent systems which has been adopted as an OMG technology. It is an early attempt to standardize an area of industry that, even though popular in the recent past, still has not caught on. In its short history MASIF has raised interest in industry and academia. There are already a number of projects pursuing MASIF reference implementation. MASIF addresses the interfaces between agent systems, not between agent applications and the agent system. Even though the former seem to be more relevant for application developers, it is the latter that impact interoperability between different agent systems. This paper describes two sets of interfaces that constitute MASIF: MAFAgentSystem and MAFFinder (the acronym MAF is used for historical reasons). MASIF extensively addresses security. The paper provides a brief description of MASIF and its interfaces, data types and data structures.

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References

  1. Agent-Tcl, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/≈agent/.

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  3. Mobile Objects and Agents, Proc. of the COOTS'98 (http://www.opengroup.org/RI/java/moa/).

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  9. Common Secure Interoperability Specification (CSI).

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  15. Chang, D., Covaci, S., The OMG Mobile Agent Facility: A Submission. Proc. of MA'97, April 1997, 98–110.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Crystaliz, Concord, MA, USA

    Sankar Virdhagriswaran

  2. General Magic, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Barry Friedman, Danny Lange, Cynthia Tham & Jim White

  3. GMD Fokus, Berlin, Germany

    Markus Breugst, Ingo Busse & Stefan Covaci

  4. IBM, Tokyo, Japan

    Kazuya Kosaka, Kouichi Ono & Mitsuru Oshima

  5. Open Group, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dejan Milojicic & John Campbell

Authors
  1. Dejan Milojicic
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  2. Markus Breugst
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  3. Ingo Busse
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  4. John Campbell
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  5. Stefan Covaci
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  6. Barry Friedman
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  7. Kazuya Kosaka
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  8. Danny Lange
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  9. Kouichi Ono
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  10. Mitsuru Oshima
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  11. Cynthia Tham
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  12. Sankar Virdhagriswaran
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  13. Jim White
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Additional information

Currently with the Sun Microsystems East

Currently with HP Labs

Currently with Cisco

was with IBM during the initial part of MASIF

Currently with Freegate.

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Milojicic, D., Breugst, M., Busse, I. et al. MASIF: The OMG mobile agent system interoperability facility. Personal Technologies 2, 117–129 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01324942

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01324942

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