COBioSIFTER – A CORBA-Based Distributed Multi-Agent Biological Information Management System

In this paper, we describe the COBioSIFTER project that aims at constructing a framework for managing information from the biological domain. It uses a distributed multi-agent approach based on the CORBA middleware and contains an architecture made up of functionally heterogeneous agents. A series of experiments has been carried out with a prototype of COBioSIFTER to illustrate its advantages such as high performance, scalability, heterogeneity, and fault tolerance. The results of these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of such an agent-based biological information framework.