Ontology acquisition and exchange of evolutionary product-brokering agents

Agent-based electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been booming with the development of the Internet and agent technologies. However, little effort has been devoted to exploring the learning and evolving capabilities of software agents. This paper addresses issues of evolving software agents in e-commerce applications. An agent structure with evolution features is proposed with a focus on internal hierarchical knowledge. We argue that knowledge base of agents should be the cornerstone for their evolution capabilities, and agents can enhance their knowledge bases by exchanging knowledge with other agents. In this paper, product ontology is chosen as an instance of knowledge base. We propose a new approach to facilitate ontology exchange among e-commerce agents. The ontology exchange model and its formalities are elaborated. Product-brokering agents have been designed and implemented, which accomplish the ontology exchange process from request to integration

Designing Interfaces to Support Collaboration in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval systems should acknowledge the existence of collaboration in the search process. Collaboration can help users to be more effective in both learning systems and in using them. We consider some issues of viewing interfaces to information retrieval systems as collaborative notations and how to build systems that more actively support collaboration. We describe a system that embodies just one kind of explicit support; a graphical representation of the search process that can be manipulated and discussed by the users. By acknowledging the importance of other people in the search process, we can develop systems that not only improve help-giving by people but which can lead to a more robust search activity, more able to cope with, and indeed exploit, the failures of any intelligent agents used

HandyBroker - An intelligent product-brokering agent for M-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called “Handy Broker” has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments looks promising for m-commerce use

Customer-engineer relationship management for converged ICT service companies

Thanks to the advent of converged communications services (often referred to as ‘triple play’), the next generation Service Engineer will need radically different skills, processes and tools from today’s counterpart. Why? in order to meet the challenges of installing and maintaining services based on multi-vendor software and hardware components in an IP-based network environment. The converged services environment is likely to be ‘smart’ and support flexible and dynamic interoperability between appliances and computing devices. These radical changes in the working environment will inevitably force managers to rethink the role of Service Engineers in relation to customer relationship management. This paper aims to identify requirements for an information system to support converged communications service engineers with regard to customer-engineer relationship management. Furthermore, an architecture for such a system is proposed and how it meets these requirements is discussed

Towards a more natural and intelligent interface with embodied conversation agent

Conversational agent also known as chatterbots are computer programs which are designed to converse like a human as much as their intelligent allows. In many ways, they are the embodiment of Turing's vision. The ability for computers to converse with human users using natural language would arguably increase their usefulness. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general have advances this field in realizing the vision of a more humanoid interactive system. This paper presents and discusses the use of embodied conversation agent (ECA) for the imitation games. This paper also presents the technical design of our ECA and its performance. In the interactive media industry, it can also been observed that the ECA are getting popular

Overview of methodologies for building ontologies

A few research groups are now proposing a series of steps and methodologies for developing ontologies. However, mainly due to the fact that Ontological Engineering is still a relatively immature discipline, each work group employs its own methodology. Our goal is to present the most representative methodologies used in ontology development and to perform an analysis of such methodologies against the same framework of reference. So, the goal of this paper is not to provide new insights about methodologies, but to put it all in one place and help people to select which methodology to use