CHI: A General Agent Communication Framework

Conference · Thu Dec 17 04:00:00 EST 1998

OSTI ID:2460

Goldsmith, S Y ^[1]; Phillips, L R; Spires, S V

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1. Sandia National Laboratories

We have completed and exercised a communication framework called CHI (CLOS to HTML Interface) by which agents can communicate with humans. CHI follows HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and produces HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for use by WWW (World-Wide Web) browsers. CHI enables the rapid and dynamic construction of interface mechanisms. The essence of CHI is automatic registration of dynamically generated interface elements to named objects in the agent's internal environment. The agent can access information in these objects at will. State is preserved, so an agent can pursue branching interaction sequences, activate failure recovery behaviors, and otherwise act opportunistically to maintain a conversation. The CHI mechanism remains transparent in multi-agent, multi-user environments because of automatically generated unique identifiers built into the CHI mechanism. In this paper we discuss design, language, implementation, and extension issues, and, by way of illustration, examine the use of the general CHI/HCHI mechanism in a specific international electronic commerce system. We conclude that the CHI mechanism is an effective, efficient, and extensible means of the agent/human communication.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 2460
• Report Number(s): SAND98-2825C; ON: DE00002460
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Computers
Data Transmission
Design
Equipment Interfaces
Exports
Human Factors Engineering
Imports
Internet
Local Area Networks
Programming Languages