Information Acquisition Through an Integrated Paradigm: Agent + Peer-to-Peer

Agent computing provides developers with a way to define problem-solving computation at an abstract level, whereas, the key strength of current P2P development centers on resource gathering and defining efficient resource discovery strategies. Integration of the two paradigms is required for the development of self-evolving, open and scalable systems. In this paper, we first investigate varieties of P2P facilities that could benefit agent development and discuss broadly different ways of integration of the two paradigms. Second, we present a prototype system, BestPeer, that exploits both agent and P2P computing. In P2P environments, the schema is typically not given in advance or it might be implicit in the data. Consequently, it is notably challenging to acquire, manage and analyze data in order to produce meaningful information for decision-making. We next present PeerDB that is built on top of BestPeer to facilitate data sharing without a global schema.