INFORMATION AGENTS FOR THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

This paper describes a distributed system of intelligent agents, Jaspe r, for performing information tasks over the Internet World Wide Web ( WWW) on behalf of a community of users. Jasper can summarise and extra ct keywords from WWW pages and can share information among users with similar interests automatically. Jasper provides agents which can retr ieve relevant WWW pages quickly and easily. A Jasper agent holds a pro file of its user, based on observing their behaviour and learning more about their interests as the system is used. A novel three-dimensiona l front end on to the Jasper system has been created using VRML (virtu al reality modelling language), a language for 3-D graphical spaces or virtual worlds networked via the global Internet and hyperlinked with in WWW. This and other ongoing research using keyword and document clu stering techniques are described.