INTELLIGENT PAGES - COLLECTING SHOP AND SERVICE INFORMATION WITH SOFTWARE AGENTS

This article introduces an information collecting method for shop and service information from the Internet. Because the shop information is heterogeneous and distributed it is difficult for users to gather and handle it. Although it is heterogeneous, it cart be semistructured in sofar as it usually has a name, address, etc. The introduce the teleph one directory information as an ontology server that defines relations hips between the user's abstract expression of shops and the concrete expression, such as shop names. We designed a software agent architect ure. Agents work together to support creating queries for users, to se arch and locate the information providers, and to organize the search results on behalf of the user. We applied this architecture to the Int elligent Pages and developed it on portable computers, a UNIX workstat ion, and Internet servers, including the telephone directory server we also developed. Intelligent Pages lists shops from the Yellow Pages w ith additional information from other sources. The advantage of this m ethod is that it produces precise and well-organized information.