Ambient Intelligence Through Agile Agents - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 297

Registration Agent. The tourist must first register for Genie services. The
Registration Agent takes care of this process as well as assigning Tourist Agents
to individual tourists in response to requests for Genie services.
Tourist Agent. All tourists registered for Genie services are assigned their
own individual agent, termed Tourist Agents, on commencing a session. In agent
parlance, such agents are cloned from the tourist agent template. Essentially, this
agent is the tourist's interface to the services offered by the Genie. Acting on
prompts from the Spatial Agent, it arranges the construction of environmental
models in conjunction with the GIS Agent and prompts the Presentation Agent
to maintain an updated list of presentations in anticipation of requests from
the Cache Agent. Though there is some computational overhead in assigning an
agent to each tourist, such an approach ensures the future scalability of the Genie
as the number of concurrent tourists increase and a wider variety of services are
offered.
GIS Agent. Accurate environmental models are necessary for the successful
operation of the Genie. Such models are provided to the Cache Agent on the
client as well as to the Presentation Agent for dynamic presentation pre-assembly
on the server.
Presentation Agent. The provision of personalized multimedia presentations
is a core tenet of the Genie's raison d'etre. Such presentations are assembled in
light of the tourist's profile and their current environmental model. This server-
side presentation repository is continuously updated in light of tourist movement
and changes to their individual profiles.
3.4 Implementation
At present, the Genie runs on a standard PDA, namely an iPAQ. GPS, which
gives a position reading to within 20 metres on average, is used for determining
location. Orientation can also be derived from GPS, albeit in an approximate
manner. For data communications, the standard 2.5G technology, the General
Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is used. In each case, a corresponding PCMCIA
card was procured. Both cards were then incorporated into the IPAQ via a
dual-slot expansion sleeve. From a software perspective, the client components
are implemented in Java and a commercial JVM, namely Jeode, is used as the
runtime environment on the IPAQ. All communication with the server takes
place over a standard HTTP connection.
On the server side, the Agent Factory runtime environment is deployed. This
is augmented with a sophisticated database that supports multiple data types
including geospatial data and multimedia-related data. A toolkit for populating
this database forms an indispensable component.
4 EasiShop
EasiShop [13-15] meanwhile is a pioneering m-commerce system that embraces a
rich technological set. EasiShop distinguishes itself in various important respects.