WORLD WIDE WEB DATABASE INTEGRATION VIA MOBILE AGENTS

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture that makes use of dynamic deployment of mobile agents to support both integration of heterogeneous/homogeneous databases on the World Wide Web (or web) and data exchange between the architecture and existing applications. The system uses an integrated and global schema to utilize agents in remote locations and HyperText Markup Language (HTML - usable even with minimal bandwidth) as the client interface and to control agents behind the scene. Using HTML reduces overhead and therefore gives the architecture performance advantages over other existing mobile agent systems. Furthermore, the system also supports the addition and removal of component databases dynamically. The exchange language used by the system is XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a standard and extensible format with supports in almost all programming languages, which can be read and understood by almost any application. With rich document structures like XML, not only can data transported by the Agents be used over the web, but it can also be used for Business To Business (B2B) data exchange between existing and/or future applications. The proposed system is shown to be better than existing techniques when higher volumes of data are to be exchanged such as is typical B2B applications. The improvements are consistently significant and are magnified substantially as the amount of data exchanged increases.