As systems become more distributed,they also become more complex.To ensure consistent execution while maximizing availability,distributed applications use various mechanisms such as replication,load balancing,and data caching.The protocols used for consistency management and component availability are traditionally instantiated by the application.However,in distributed object-based environments like CORBA or Java RMI,the infrastructure can often determine adequate protocols to guarantee liveness and safety based on the request and semantic knowledge of the application.This paper discusses how semantic knowledge of distributed objects can help implement intelligent behavior in middleware and choose optimal protocols for distributed component interactions.