From DARPA, the folks who among other things, helped bring you the complicated theoretical bits of the Semantic Web, Ultralog: "UltraLog's goals are: operate with up to 45% information infrastructure loss in an environment that is 90% as chaotic as the most chaotic real world environment with not more than 20% capabilities degradation and not more than 30% performance degradation for a period representing 180 days of sustained military operations in a major theater contingency." Those goals are the kind of severe outage and extreme network disconectedness that drove the original Internet architecture. Looks like DARPA want to do it all over again at the higher layers. This particular effort is building on COUGAAR, a well-known* Intelligent Agents framework. Autonomic Computing and Semantic Web hype comes to mind, but some things do look interesting for the here and now (if only because they're consistent with some conversations that have gone on in work): Phil Windley points out that this lot are using Jabber as their messaging backplane. Jon Udell also interviewed (.mov) one of the team on the value of using dynamic programming languages (in this case, Ruby). * Ok, so this is only 'well known' perhaps if you know a bit about IA and DAI in the first place....
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