Extending applications using reflective assistant agents

Author

Di Stefano, Antonella ; Pappalardo, Giuseppe ; Santoro, Corrado ; Tramontana, Emiliano

Author_Institution

Dipt. di Ingegneria Informatica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Catania Univ., Italy

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

587

Lastpage

594

Abstract

Assistant agents are software systems that help users during activities by carrying out some task as a reaction to events in their environment. This paper proposes a software architecture that allows assistant agents to extend applications by autonomously giving users suggestions and activating useful application functionalities. The connection between applications and assistant agents is realised by means of computational reflection, which allows applications to evolve essentially without changes to their source code. The proposed approach is general in that it does not depend on a specific application nor platform. Its application is demonstrated by two examples of reflective assistant agents for a Web browser supporting data presentation and e-shopping respectively.

Keywords

electronic commerce; online front-ends; retail data processing; software agents; software architecture; Web browser; computational reflection; data presentation; e-shopping; reflective assistant agents; software architecture; software systems; Application software; Electronic commerce; Internet; Programming; Software architecture; Software performance; Software systems; Telecommunications; User interfaces; Web pages;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2002. COMPSAC 2002. Proceedings. 26th Annual International

ISSN

0730-3157

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1727-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CMPSAC.2002.1045068

Filename

1045068