Study Of Modern Distance Education System Based On Web Service And Multi-Agent

The Modern Distance Education System (MDES) is an online education system built on current Internet and related web service technology. MDES is another round educational revolution compared with the traditional education system. The MDES built in current Internet technology takes incomparable advantages over the traditional education system. The MDES expanded the education space from the traditional classroom to any Internet accessible space, which improved the general studying environment. The MDES also can provide plenty of education resource as well as convenient interactive teaching and studying tools. Therefore, the development of the MDES improved the capability, quality and space of whole education system.But, all the current MDESes are under developed and not fully implemented to support the complicated education requirement. The functionality and reusable modules of MDES are limited. The MDES's flexibility and intelligence needs to be improved significantly. All the above made the resource sharing and interactive operation difficult, so the results of education by MDES are not satisfied so far.Web services are loosely coupled and are composed of reusable software modules. Once the web services are published in the Internet, all the agents and user applications can visit and reuse the services via standard Internet protocol. And web services also provide the common communications between applications and agents. Agents run in the dynamic environment and are independent software applications. The agents can provide service directly or serve as proxy agents for other agents. So all the agents must be cooperative, active and have learning ability, which is called intelligent agents. Only the intelligent agents with such attributes can be used in the complicated education system. So if we can implement the MDES by current web service technology and intelligent agents, we should be able to improve the flexibility, quality and capability of current MDES dramatically. The functionality of the MDES with intelligent agents should be much better than the other MDES.This thesis will analyze the attributes of web service and intelligent agents. Based on the analysis, we will discuss the applicability for integrating the web service technology...