Cooperative information agents for digital cities

A digital city is a social information infrastructure for urban life (inclu ding shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on). We started a project to develop a digital city for Kyoto based on the newest t echnologies including cooperative information agents. This paper presents a n architecture for digital cities and shows the roles of agent interfaces i n it. We propose two types of cooperative information agents as follows: (a ) the front-end agents determine and refine users' uncertain goals, (b) the back-end agents extract and organize relevant information from the Interne t, (c) Both types of agents opportunistically cooperate through a blackboar d. We also show the research guidelines towards social agents in digital ci ties; the agent will foster social interaction among people who are living in/visiting the city.