Agent-based Design of Distributed Hypertext

In this paper we describe how a set of autonomous computational agents cooperate in providing efficient management of information as well as control for the design of a general and complete hypertext environment. We discuss two populations of agents. The first population is defined as support for the basic resources involved in the hypertext; their duties are explained, proving how appropriate distribution of task and knowledge enhance the effectiveness of our model, in terms of control and data management. The second category of agents is then introduced; we explain how such category implements information retrieval facilities and improves key issues of hypertext systems, such as versioning management. The computational model chosen to define the agent entities is Agha's model; the problem of describing implementation effort is faced using a simple actor-level descriptive language