Agents (Was Re: Students use of search engines.)

[Paul Hollands]

At 08:17 06/06/96 -0700, Nick Arnett wrote:
>
>This begs the definition of agent, doesn't it?  Right now, it generally
>refers to persistent searches.  In other words, you've defined something
>that you're interested in and you tell the agent software to keep an eye
>out for it.  The big problem there is it can't find anything that you
>didn't tell it to watch for, so you don't see  new things... unless you
>make the leap to searching and watching meta-information, such as the sort
>of thing being done by Firefly and others.

I suppose what I envision is some type of personal information 'broker' . An
agent (or colony of agents) that has your profile of information
requirements, but that also communicates with other brokers with similar
profiles to yours to do the same sort of thing as Firefly, ie. suggest
related subject areas that may be of interest to you.

I suppose it would be a sort of 'current awareness' engine. It would of
course control synonyms and homonyms in an interactive way depending on what
sources it was interogating. (I believe the Harvest system is able to do
this, though I have a limited understanding of Harvesting...[Please feel
free to jump in here anytime Jim'll. I'm getting out of my depth..])

I suppose that the best approach would be to have existing robots producing
the databases of inverted indexes as they do now [Alta Vistas & Inktomis of
this world] and then let your own agent army lose on the databases rather
than roaming the Net itself.

Instead of having a browser perhaps you would just have a client to contact
your broker.

The clever bit is that it would monitor your communications when you surf
the www/usenet and also your email and I suppose your IRC and MOO activities
and interactively tweak you profile as your interests change. You would  use
your 'broker' client for all of these services and it would filter the
information as it came through.

In fact.....

Dear Dr. Amelio,

I've got this great idea to get Apple back on track..... Na.. Perhaps not.
He must get a million of these a day..

Perhaps Steve might be interested if I told him Bill was keen too...

****************************************
Paul Hollands <p.j.hollands at lboro.ac.uk>
Internet Information Officer
Loughborough University UK 01509 222373
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/e_sources_main.html