The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Agents : concept, technologies & applications and search engine to compile URLs containing documents related to environment science for NJPIES
Author:	Shah, Dhaval P.
View Online:	njit-etd1999-091 (ix, 77 pages ~ 4.2 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Computer and Information Science
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Computer Science
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Kurfess, Franz J. (Committee chair) Healey, Marcus J. (Committee member) Wang, Jason T. L. (Committee member)
Date:	1999-08
Keywords:	Computers --Network. Mobile agents (Computer software).
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Agents are emerging technology that is making computer systems easier to use by allowing people (computer users) to delegate work back to the computer. They act on user's behalf and achieve user's goals. The advent of these software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Agents are in research area for a long time. Earlier they were considered a part of just Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays they are just not in research area anymore. Commercial agent based applications are existing in the market because of the popularity of different technologies and toolkits. Now it is easier and convenient to incorporate artificial intelligence in a programming practice. Software Agents are suitable for various kind of applications. Mobility is one of the important properties, agents can have which make them superior to other agents. Mobile agents can facilitate message transfers between systems when used in System and Network Management. IBM's Aglets Software Development Kit [ASDK] is popular and de facto standard for developing a mobile agent. Information Search and Filtering is another domain where agents are useful. NJPIES (New Jersey Program for Information Ecology and Sustainability) is associated to environmental data collection, compilation, integration and provision. `EnviroSearch' application mentioned in this report is for NJIT's NJPIES program and is actually a search agent developed in Object Oriented Java language. Agent searches environment related URLs (web sites) for documents, articles, etc. on the Internet, analyzes them based on their content. Selected URLs are then stored in Oracle database with JDBC interface.