Facing environment discontinuity through user location

Abstract

Web communities are an important current trend in the Web. Unlike web “surfers”, their members share common interests and gathers for long periods. One of their key needs is interactivity among members, nevertheless, web applications are discontinuous and passive in the sense that users must login constantly into their applications to know the last events. As users are more mobile, distributed or belongs to various communities, this feature could overwhelm them and hinder interactivity. Our aim is to provide web applications with a proactive approach, where users can be reached through different devices seamlessly. In order to do so, it is important to determine events relevance and users availability preferences for multiple contexts. The proposal is enabled as a multi-agent system (MAS) where agents reason based on ontologies and direct event notification trough different channels or devices.