Interesting spots
Danny has a good remark on so-called proper technologies for building agent systems.
Concepts and implementation should not be confused but agents systems have to be build! So far agent research has mainly focussed on conceptualization. Conceptualization intends to clarify what the building blocks of multi-agent systems are and how they relate to one another. However conceptualization also should bring up abstractions that enable the development of multi-agent systems. Agents can be implemented with Java or Fortran but these languages are not designed with agent systems in mind, so they do not offer the right abstractions for building such systems (although some are very useful). From a software engineering point of view, we need to map the high level abstractions deduced from conceptualization to proper technologies. Language technology is just one example (and maybe an ultimate one). This seems for me the only way to enable agent technology in practice on a large scale. Danny Weyns,
AgentWise, DistriNet
KULeuven — Belgium