WebAssist: a user profile specific information retrieval assistant

Despite the ever increasing information available on the Internet today, finding accurate information for a specific topic becomes more and more difficult. This paper describes the concept of a proxy based information classification and filtering utility, named WebAssist. On the behalf of users a private view of the WWW is generated based on a previously determined profile. This profile is created by monitoring the user (and group) activities when browsing WWW pages. Additional features are integrated to allow for easy interoperability in workgroups with similar project interests, maintain personal and common hotlists with automatic modification checks and a sophisticated search engine front-end. The proxy architecture allows easy configurability using standard Web browsers and eliminates the necessity to install additional platform specific software. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.