Lito Perez Cruz, Arkady Zaslavsky and David McG. Squire,
Building a Collaborative Information Agent in a HomeBot
Application,
In Proceedings of Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems (UMICS 2003), held in conjunction with CAiSE'03,
Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria, pp. 38-46, 16-17 June 2003.Information agents are cooperative agents whose main goal is to collaborate and assist task agents like mobile agents in obtaining information from heterogenous data sources. This study sets out to find the practical problems that a developer might encounter in the process of engineering an information agent in the context of a real estate agent based application. In our research, we investigated the practicality of constructing an information agent based on existing tools available in the marketplace. We enumerate the practical issues that one will face in the engineering of such an agent in a mobile agent HomeBot application. We also set out in here some suggested techniques in overcoming them. Our contention is that the construction of an information agent is feasible but tedious, but more importantly what is needed is an integrated tool that is yet missing and is not provided for in the community, somethng agent tool builders should address immediately.