Making the agent technology ready for web-based information systems

Abstract

The agent technology has become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing research area in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. But, there is still a big gap toward the wide scale adoption of the emerged agent technology by the software industry. Even if agent standards matured and stable agent platform implementations exist, the software industry still sees the adoption only after 2010 [1]. In this paper we propose a model for integration of agents in a web-based information system, from the standard information system engineering point of view. Rather than the agent-technology standards which sees the integration centered around the agent concepts, our approach is oriented around the standard object-oriented software process, which further allows the separation of roles in the software development team. Thus, average educated software engineers can approach agent solutions without the need of learning the agent technology, by only having the help of an agent expert. We exemplified our approach by presenting the design of a web-based application for information search, with the support of a multi-agent system. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.