Agent-based Electronic Consumer Catalogs.
Ronald Schrooten · 1996
The presented work is an example of a pilot application that is concerned with the production of electronic consumer catalogs and their delivery to customers through the Internet. The technology behind the application is based on software agents. An agent-based presentation paradigm is explained and three different classes of agents, i.e. personal, navigation, and advice agents, are described. The work illustrates new opportunities for electronic commerce and discusses the contributions of an agent-based approach. 1 Introduction Achieving a society of intelligent software agents living on the Internet and acting on behalf of their users is one of the major research topics going on in the VUB AI-lab 1 . To reach this fascinating goal, we started working on specific cases in the context of several national 2 and European research projects 3 . Intelligent software agents for flexible presentation of information, navigation through large amounts of distributed information sources 1...