Roles of agents in data-intensive web sites

Abstract

The Data-Intensive Web Sites provide access to a large number of Web pages whose content is dynamically extracted from structured databases. They may be used for shopping or paying in e-commerce, for reading news in a newspaper site or to consult digital library. In this context, users often need rich content and fresh data. Several techniques have been developed to meet the demand for faster and more efficient access to the DIWS. Among them a main role is acquired by the replication, the caching, the materialization, and the refreshing of data. Software agents have proved to be a good tool that may give a high performance results on the Web. In this paper, we address their cases of use in the DIWS. We discuss cases in which agents can be used to improve the data management performance. The aim is to specify tasks that may profit from the increase development in agent technologies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.