DIET background

The DIET project

The DIET Agents platform was created as part of the DIET project, where DIET stands for Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies. This was a European collaboration project funded by the European union under the Framework 5 program. The DIET project was part of the Information Societies Technologies projects, more specifically the Universal Information Ecosystem Initiative. The project finished 1 July 2003, after which the DIET Agents platform has been released as Open Source.

Project goals

The goals of the DIET project were:

• To study, implement and validate a novel information processing and management framework via a "bottom up" and ecosystem-inspired approach leading to an open, robust, adaptive and scalable environment. This has resulted in the DIET Agents platform.
  
  
• To research into the effects of alternative forms of agent-interaction under an ecological model, using techniques from Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life.
  
  
• To validate and demonstrate the usefulness of the platform, via four tasks: information retrieval, filtering, mining and trading.

Contributors

The partners of the DIET project were:

• BT, United Kingdom
  • Main contributions:
    • Coordination of DIET project
    • Development of DIET Agents platform
    • Research into decentralisation and self-organisation
    • Development of DIET applications
  • Contact: Dr. Paul Marrow, Pervasive ICT Centre, BT
    
    
• DFKI, Germany
  • Main contributions:
    • Development of DIET visualisation software
  • Contact: Dr. Rolf Hendrik van Lengen, Intelligent Visualisation and Simulation Systems, DFKI
    
    
• Technical University of Crete, Greece
  • Main contributions:
    • Research into selective information dissemination in P2P systems, resource allocation in P2P systems and load balancing for P2P systems
    • Development of DIET applications
  • Contact: Prof. Manolis Koubarakis, Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Technical University of Crete
    
    
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
  • Main contributions:
    • Research into information retrieval, mining and filtering
    • Development of DIET applications
  • Contact: Prof. Francisco Valverde-Albacete, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid