British Council Academic Research Collaboration

This research proposal belongs to the field of information technology, and in particular is concerned with the management of distributed information in corporate Intranet applications. Agent technology is used in a wide range of activities, such as information discovery, filtering and analysis on the Internet or negotiation on behalf of the user. However, few agent systems consider the constraints set by the limited resources of our environment, such as time, (disk) space, bandwidth, or geographic locality. The participants have developed a framework to monitor and control resource consumption in distributed applications. The goal of this proposal is to explore the idea of distributed databases and resource-aware agents and to investigate its use in the context of corporate document management. The partners have complementary expertise in the proposed research areas: the Multimedia Group at the University of Southampton has experience in the control of resources for distributed computations; the Department of Information Systems at the University of Linz has expertise in object-oriented modelling and distributed object-oriented databases.