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Responsibilities of an agent

Every agent has the following responsibilities:

  1. Inform the Task Manager when it has started and when it is about to close.
  2. Set up one or more DDE servers to accept incoming requests.
  3. Recognise contents expressed in KIF embedded in KQML messages, and return an appropriate result.
  4. Recognise a minimal set of performatives for asking for and volunteering information.
  5. Pass results back to the requesting agent (usually the Task Manager) in a predefined format. The returned KQML points to the actual information: this can be a file, the clipboard, or a number of other locations. Usually it will be a file, since this is easiest to implement. The result also specifies the type of the file, so the TM knows how to present it to the user.