Jasper: Communicating Information Agents for WWW
John K. Davies, Richard Weeks, M. C. Revett · 1995
This paper discusses a distributed system of intelligent agents for performing information tasks over the Internet World Wide Web (W3) on behalf of a user or community of users. We describe how agents are used to store, retrieve, summarize and inform other agents about information found on W3. Most current W3 clients (Mosaic, Netscape, and so on) provide some means of storing pages of interest to the user. Typically, this is done by allowing the user to create a (possibly hierarchical) menu of names associated with particular uniform resource locators (URLs). While useful, this quickly becomes unwieldy when a reasonably large number of W3 pages are involved. The solution we adopt to this problem is to allow the user to access information by a much richer set of metainformation than simply names assigned to particular URLs. Given the vast amount of information available on W3, it is preferable to avoid the copying of information from its original location to a local server. The local storage of only relevant metainformation also addresses this issue. The metainformation used includes automatically extracted keywords and summary, as well as the document title, URL and date and time of access. This metainformation is then used to index on the actual information when a retrieval request is made. When an agent stores a page, it will also automatically inform other users who it considers will be interested in the page's discovery via an email message. Thus Jasper is a small step towards automating the original vision for W3 as a network which supports cooperative working and the sharing of information. In addition, Jasper agents will modify a user's profile as the type of information the user is accessing changes. Pages stored in Jasper can be posted to interest groups, creating shared information resources about specific topics.