Information agents for automated browsing

Abstract

The proliferation of information providers has led to an increased number of users browsing the World Wide Web. 'lime-consuming interaction and increased network loads are some of the adverse effects of browsing activities. This paper presents a design based on agent technology and the use of structured information, that significantly lowers network load and hits user-interaction by automating the task of browsing. combines the use of Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML)[14] and Java[3] to design a scalable model for agent communication. KQML is a protocol for information exchange among agents. Java is an objectoriented, interpretive language specifically developed for heterogeneous, platform-independent, distributed network computing.Our design enables us to pass object-oriented Java code in declarative KQML messages.It is our belief that building a model based on these ideas, should significantly lower network load and limit user-interaction by automating the task of browsing and composing information. It is our hypothesis that agent technology significantly reduces the complexity of browsing wide-area information by reducing communication and filtering overhead as well as by distributing the workload. In a simplistic view, an agent accepts specifications for the desired information, interacts with relevant information providers, and composes information from various information sources to fit the user's specification. Our goal is to make the infrastructure as general as possible in order to accommodate a wide range of information content and agent-based tmmactions.Specifically, our work addresses the issues of automating the task of browsing by executing content filtering and evaluation at remote sites. In addition, we believe that wellstntctured information content eases the task of automated browsing by agents.We demonstrate this by using the Nebula File System[8] for storage and retrieval of content via agents. The Nebula F1le System is a prototype wide-area information system, that offers a model for organizing and storing structured information.Section 2 describes the problems and issues regarding 296 browsing. In section 3 we present the idea of an agent and discuss some of the design issues involved. We also present the agent primitives in particular, content primitives, communication primitives and movement primitives for mobile agents. Section 4 demonstrates a small example.Section 5 discusses background and related work.

An integrated framework for recommendation systems in e‐commerce

“…The system is able to support information updating and reduce the number of links by deleting less-used items. A Web-based information browse agent is proposed by Dharap and Freeman (1996). The system uses the KQML as the agent communication language and reduces networking load.…”

Dynamic data retrieval on the world wide web

“…We expect this approach to help resolve performance problems associated with extracting data on remote server on behalf of the user. The issue of distributing data extraction to remote sites is not newan example of a similar system is described in [DF96]. In [MMM96] users interact with Java applets (that always execute on the client computer) to pose queries to the…”

Διαδικτυακές Αρχιτεκτονικές Λογισμικού Για Κατανεμημένη Παράλληλη Επεξεργασία

“…Τα τελευταία χρόνια αναγνωρίστηκε η ανάγκη ολοκλήρωσης τέτοιων υποδομών με εξυπηρετητές Ιστού. Όπως προαναφέρθηκε, τα υπάρχοντα συστήματα που παρέχουν ολοκλήρωση μεταξύ των κινητών πρακτόρων και εξυπηρετητών Ιστού ακολουθούν είτε την προσέγγιση μιας πλατφόρμας κινητών πρακτόρων που είναι λίγο ή καθόλου διασυνδεδεμένη με τον εξυπηρετητή [117,118] ή υλοποιούν ειδικούς εξυπηρετητές ικανούς εκτός των άλλων να φιλοξενήσουν πράκτορες λογισμικού [119]. Άλλες επίσης ερευνητικές προσπάθειες [120,121] προτείνουν διαφορετικούς μηχανισμούς για την στενή ολοκλήρωση υποδομών κινητών πρακτόρων σε ήδη υπάρχουσες υποδομές από εξυπηρετητές διαδικτύου βασιζόμενες κυρίως στην τεχνολογία των servlets και το πρότυπο JavaBeans.…”