TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell

Information Bearing Agents

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell2

Contents

• What is an Information Bearing Agent (IBA) ?• Position of IBA’s in a evolutionary perspective• Rational of IBA’s• Behaviors:

• Information maintenance• Information security

• Demonstration

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell3

What is an Information Bearing Agent (IBA) ?

• IBA’s contain some information.• Similar to a row (or rows) in a table of a relational database or

to a node from the Semantic Network• Their information is unique (no other IBA’s have the same

information)• They are responsible for their information

• IBA’s can be stored as an optionally encrypted file assuring persistency over time.

• IBA’s have behaviors enabling manipulation of the information they are bearing.

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell4

Position of IBA’s in a evolutionary perspective

• They represent the second phase in the evolution of the Semantic Network Technology (Poell, 2001)

• The first stage is a Semantic Network (with the actual Semantic Network Engine).

• The second level consist of the usage of IBA’s• The future third phase integrates complete devices as IBA-like

components

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell5

Rational of IBA’s

• Transforming static information into an IBA is only useful when the associated behaviors provide new possibilities.

• Most of the behaviors can be implemented in traditional non-distributed systems, but are extremely difficult to realize in a distributed (not always perfectly interconnected) environment.

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell6

Behaviors: Information maintenance

• In a large scale information system, running for a long time, manual information maintenance cannot be realized.

• Each IBA can evaluate the quality and relevance of their information.

• Internally• In comparison to their environment: the related IBA’s• In relation to the outside world (non IBA)

• Frequencies of evaluation are determined by previous results.• They have their own evaluation frequency models• The activity is distributed over time

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell7

Behaviors: Information Security

• Information coming from a secured source (through authorization, authentication and encrypted transmission) exist in a non secured form on a local device (most actual systems).

• IBA’s can move to a device and reside their in an encrypted form.• They are responsible for releasing their information each time

it is requested.• Information Bound Security

• Availability• IBA’s can be cloned and distributed• Several methods for assuring synchronization are available• Access to IBA’s is on a best effort base

2006-12-06TNO Defense and Security, Ronald Poell8

Demonstration

• The demonstration system is implemented in the SPYSE agent platform (Python).

• Actually 19.295 IBA’s• The information they bear comes from the Semantic Network

through XML.• A web interface allows the search and the visualization of the

available agents.• Memory load is governed through access frequency evaluation• Agents will be equally distribute themselves among the available

Information Bearing Agents Systems (IBAS)