Responsibilities of an agent
Every agent has the following responsibilities:
- Inform the Task Manager when it has started and when it is
about to close.
- Set up one or more DDE servers to accept incoming requests.
- Recognise contents expressed in KIF embedded in KQML messages,
and return an appropriate result.
- Recognise a minimal set of performatives for asking for and volunteering information.
- 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.