A system architecture for intelligent browsing on the Web

Compared with traditional business operations, WWW-based commerce has many advantages, such as timeliness, worldwide communication, hyperlinks, and mu ltimedia. However, there are also several browsing problems, such as gettin g lost, consuming a great amount of time browsing, and lack of customized i nteractive features. To acquire a competitive advantage over the countless number of Web sites, it is critical to solve these browsing problems. The p urpose of this paper is to systematically review all browsing problems and then propose a system architecture for intelligent browsing on the Web. In this architecture, we present five kinds of browsing agents: recommendation agent, new-contents agent, search agent, customized agent, and personal-st atus agent. In order to support these agents, a user analyzer is provided t o maintain the user profile by analyzing log files and CGI parameters. A si te monitor is provided to maintain the site database by monitoring all chan ges to the site. We also developed a prototype to demonstrate the feasibili ty of the proposed system architecture. Finally, due to the time limitation s, a laboratory experiment was carried out to verify the only value of the customized agent. The value of the agent was confirmed. (C) 2000 Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.