programming with agents:
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mt/thesis/mt-thesis.html
framer:
from: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/353/sectionb/haase.html
In 1992, Nathan Abramson at the Media Lab implemented Dtypes, a simple network protocol for exchanging LISP-like objects. This was used in news software being developed at the time. A year and a half later, Klee Dienes took the Dtype package and reimplemented it in C++, adding a LISP interpreter (for the Scheme dialect of LISP) to allow the use of interpreted programs or scripts within and around the Dtype universe. Recently, this implementation has matured and has been ported to Java under the guidance of Dan Gruhl.
On a parallel track, the Lab's Machine Understanding Group had been developing a series of AI languages designed to be accessible to a large non-AI community and to support fairly large databases. The first such language, ARLOtje, was developed as a teaching tool but ended up being used in a number of research projects. One situational problem was that much of the Lab's work was done (for reasons both cultural and technical) in the C programming language, while the AI tools we developed were generally written in Common LISP.
In the spring of 1992, we began the implementation of Framer, a set of representation tools in LISP and C that allowed data to be shared between them. Framer incorporated a scripting language based on Scheme with the addition of special provisions for dealing with sets and collections of arguments and return values. Framer also was used in a variety of prototype systems at the Media Lab and was the structure underlying our first work on relational retrieval from large databases.
The development paths of Framer and Dtypes collided in the spring of 1994, when FramerD? was first developed (originally in LISP) by implementing procedures for reading and writing Dtype representations from LISP. This soon led to the implementation of Dtype servers in LISP, allowing technology developed in the Machine Understanding Group (for instance, a broad-coverage natural language parser) to be accessed by Dtype programs written by other groups.