Discovering intelligent agent: A tool for helping students searching a library

Abstract

Nowadays, the explosive growth of the Internet has brought us such a huge number of books, publications, and documents that hardly any student can consider all of them. Finding the right book at the right time is an exhausting and time-consuming task, especially for new students who have diverse learning styles, needs, and interests. Moreover, the growing number of books in one subject can overwhelm students trying to choose the right book. This paper overcomes this challenge by ranking books using the pyramid collaborative filtering method. Based on this method, we have designed and implemented an agent called Discovering Intelligent Agent (DIA). The agent searches both the University of Montreal's and Amazon's library and then returns a list of books related to students' models and contents of the books. © Springer-Verlag 2004.