Papers about the Knowbot Software

Here are some papers about applications of the Knowbot software, published by members of the Knowbot software development team.

Using the Knowbot Operating Environment in a Wide-Area Network

Jeremy Hylton and Guido van Rossum
Presented at the 3rd ECOOP Workshop on Mobile Object Systems, Jyväskylä, Finland, June 1997.

Mobile agents can optimize their communication patterns to reduce bandwidth and latency and can adapt to changes in network service. We report on use of the Knowbot Operating Environment to support mobile agents in a wide-area network. Experiments with an application that monitors Web pages for changes show that a mobile program can outperform its stationary counterpart. The performance benefits are obtained by moving clients within the network to reduce the costs of wide-area network connections.

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Knowbot programming: System support for mobile agents

Jeremy Hylton, Ken Manheimer, Fred L. Drake Jr., Barry Warsaw, Roger Masse, and Guido van Rossum
In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Object Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOOS '96), pages 8-13, Seattle, Wash., October 1996.

Knowbot Programs are mobile agents intended for use in widely distributed systems like the Internet. We describe our experiences implementing security, process migration, and inter-process communication in a prototype system implemented using the object-oriented programming language Python. This infrastructure supports applications that are composed of multiple, autonomous agents that can migrate to use network resources more efficiently.

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Other Papers

Here are a few papers and reports which provide some background on the Knowbot project.

A framework for distributed digital object services

Robert Kahn and Robert Wilensky
May, 1995.

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Workshop on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Library System

Subtitled: Knowbots in the Real World
Corporation for National Research Initatives, Reston, Va., May 18-19, 1989.

Available on request from CNRI.

The Digital Library Project, volume I: The world of Knowbots

Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf
Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Reston, Va., March 1988.

Available on request from CNRI.