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The project concerns the development of Web Agent Support to enable average users to keep track of relevant information on the Web.

In a relatively short time, the Web has become a de facto standard for the dissemination and retrieval of information. Due to the exponential growth of the Web and the information it provides, finding relevant information has become more and more difficult. In particular, browsing is in most cases no longer appropriate for the user searching for specific information.

It is our view that, in the near future, access to the Web will increasingly be mediated by intelligent helper applications, software agents, that assist the user in finding relevant and interesting information. The goal of our project WASP is to provide support for developing such agents.

By combining our joint expertise, we plan to develop a framework that encompasses modeling aspects as well as the realization of software assistants for intelligent Web access. As testified by the references, our expertise covers

  • the realization of Web-aware applications,
  • client- and server-side support for information retrieval and information maintenance, and
  • modeling and specification of cooperative agents in a multi-agent framework.
Combining our experience and the technology that resulted from our previous research activities enables us to develop a practical framework for designing and implementing intelligent Web agents and to tackle the research issues involved in the definition and realization of personal software assistents that help the average user to disentangle the complexities of the Web.

The project is envisaged to result in a framework providing support for:

  • intelligent navigation and information retrieval,
  • information and document maintenance,
  • user interfaces for Web-aware applications,
  • dynamic documents with user-defined applets,
  • declarative descriptions of agent-behavior based on user-preferences,
  • declarative modeling of coordinated and cooperative behavior of software agents, and
  • programming single and multi-agent systems.
As a target product for the WASP project, which allows us to demonstrate our results to the scientific community and other interested parties, we envisage to develop Pamela (Personal Assistant for Maintaining Electronic Archives), an application combining the functional and architectural features mentioned above.