Information agents for the World Wide Web

This paper describes a distributed system of intelligent agents, Jasper, for performing information tasks over the Internet World Wide Web (WWW) on behalf of a community of users. Jasper can summarise and extract keywords from WWW pages and can share information among users with similar interests automatically. Jasper provides agents which can retrieve relevant WWW pages quickly and easily. A Jasper agent holds a profile of its user, based on observing their behaviour and learning more about their interests as the system is used. A novel three-dimensional front end on to the Jasper system has been created using VRML (virtual reality modelling language), a language for 3-D graphical spaces or virtual worlds networked via the global Internet and hyperlinked within WWW. This and other ongoing research using keyword and document clustering techniques are described.