Virtual space for effective information mediation through interactions with Info-Agents

To mediate between information seekers and information providers in the Internet, there have been various devices proposed such as search engines, knowbots, and push services. However it still requires time-consuming effort to get desired information and to keep up with the changes of the essential information. As a novel way of mediation, we propose virtual common space with Info-Agents: agents that interact with information seekers on behalf of information providers. Info-Agent has static knowledge of its information source and answers questions from information seekers. It undertakes requests to inform the seekers when it gets updated specified information that is unknown or not determined at the time of the requests. This helps information seekers to keep up with the changes. The requests are converted into condition-action rules of the Info-Agent and added to the rule-base as its dynamic knowledge. When its static knowledge is changed, Info-Agent examines current conditions and picks up matched rules to trigger methods stated in the rules. We implemented Info-Agents using an active information-base system named Active Trias. Based on multiuser domain object-oriented methods, our virtual space provides various ways of communication such as real time talk, sending mail, between information seekers. The space metaphor makes it easy for the disposition of subjects carried by Info-Agents. In this paper, we propose the concepts, describe the implementation and illustrate example cases to show the applicability of our concepts.