MANTHA: agent-based management of hypermedia documents

We present an open architecture for the authoring, publishing and archiving of hypermedia documents on the Internet. The multi-agent approach is adopted, and provides solutions to design a new software layer on the top of the Internet protocol suite. We propose an agent model with the requirements of autonomy, social ability, reactivity and pro-activeness. An agent template, JAMES, has been developed using JAVA and KQML as the agent communication language. On this basis, an agency is proposed and designed according to a federated model. The architecture is domain-independent, but a prototype application has been designed in the telepathology domain. The user is given an integrated set of services, based on a structure model of the clinical case (i.e., the document), as well as metadata representation techniques. Results of the prototype implementation are presented and discussed