Distributed objects in a federation of autonomous cooperating agents

This paper presents a model for creating and modifying complex objects that are distributed in a network of autonomous cooperating agents. The information that agents are willing to share with others in the federation is uniformly represented as inter-related objects. This defines a distributed object graph that spans over the entire federation of agents. Complex objects form a connected subgraph of this distributed object graph. To support safe cooperation and sharing of complex objects, while preserving agents' autonomy, agents can negotiate with each other on the access rights and deletion policies on distributed complex object and when necessary the rights are propagated. Since the rights are negotiated among agents, the autonomy of each agent is fully maintained.<
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