Deploying Information Agents on the Web

Abstract

The information resources on the Web are vast, but much of the Web is based on a browsing paradigm that requires someone to actively seek information. In stead, one would like to have information agents that continuously attend to one's personal information needs. Such agents need to be able to extract the relevant information from web sources, integrate data across sites, and execute efficiently in a networked environment. In this paper I describe the technologies we have developed to rapidly construct and deploy information agents on the Web. This includes wrapper learning to convert online sources into agent-friendly resources, query planning and record linkage to integrate data across different sites, and streaming dataflow execution to efficiently execute agent plans. I also describe how we applied this work within the Electric Elves project to deploy a set of agents for continuous monitoring of travel itineraries.