Querying Distributed Geographic Information Based on Mobile Agent

As a recently developed paradigm in distributed computing,mobile agent can especially benefit(mobile) Internet applications on providing asynchronous task execution and more dynamics,supporting flexible and extensible cooperation,reducing communication bandwidth,enhancing real time abilities and higher degree of robustness,enabling off-line processing and disconnected operation.This paper presents an approach based on mobile agent to query distributed geographic information,which can overcome the drawbacks of the traditional connection-based access method.A prototype is implemented to access distributed geographic information transparently by using Aglets,which is a free mobile agent development platform developed by IBM.In our on-going research project,mobile agents are responsible for remote information retrieval.A user submits spatial or nonspatial query through a GUI interface built at the client machine,and the query is analyzed and decomposed at a server site.Then some mobile agents are created and dispatched to the respective sites to retrieve data autonomously and separately.Distributed GIS based on mobile agent is more adaptable to the open,heterogeneous,autonomous(mobile) Internet with limited bandwidth and unstable communication connectivity.