Facilitating agent development in open distributed systems

One of the main reasons about the success of the Web is that many ``regular users'' are able to create Web pages that, using yperlinks, incrementally extend both the size and the complexity of the Web itself. The development of agents in the Web infrastructure should ideally be driven by the same paradigm: users writing simple or advanced agents. These agents will then provide capabilities using a set of resources, such as standard Web pages, Web services and, of course, other agents. At the moment, however, agents providing advanced services will never be developed as Web pages have been created in the past. In fact programming agents is a complex task which needs adequate skills and tools to be carried out successfully. As a consequence, only few people are currently able to contribute to their development. Anyway, will it be possible to reduce this gap in the future? In this paper we answer this question presenting NOWHERE, an open agent communication infrastructure which facilitates the programming task in open distributed multi-agent systems