Multimedia Distributed Learning Environments: Evolution towards Intelligent Communications

In this paper we describe the realization of a Multimedia Distributed Learning System developed by means of the Java language in a Intranet environment. In particular, we focus our discussion on the definition of the existing scenario, on the requirements specification and on the description of our overall system, by providing also first experimental results. We decided to add to our system a Software Agents based Intelligent Communication Support to manage both high level and low level communication needs coming from the nature of the application. Such communication needs could reasonably be considered as shared by a large family of distributed applications based on Intranet technologies. We present the main characteristics of our agents and describe how to use them to better achieve defined goals in terms of flexibility and scalability and to add network-awareness capabilities to the application.