ICA: a company profile retrieving agent used to form virtual enterprises
C.C. Syleos, Nikolaos Protogeros, John Mylonakis · International Journal of Management Practice · 2005
Virtual Enterprises are formed by real companies with the proper expertise in particular areas. Today, more and more companies use the whole spectrum of available technologies to publish their interests and business activities on the World Wide Web. This paper attempts to tackle the problem of searching for potential partners to enter Virtual Enterprises with the use of software agents. An agent named ICA is introduced into the system. This agent initially posts queries to existing search engines, to collect URLs and store them inside the system's repository. Then, in a second pass the agent is given the absolute URLs to match web content and structure against predefined business activity profiles. In this way, ICA assists the Business Integrator to locate possible partners to join the Virtual Enterprise.