Link services or link agents?

Abstract

A general link service for the WWW has been used within an Electronic Libraries' project. Experience using it shows that as the links become increasingly interesting to the user, processing them becomes increasingly expensive. Eventually textual analysis, ontological services and remote database lookups conflict with the goal of prompt delivery of documents. This paper summarizes the history of the Link Service software behind the Open Journal project together with the kind of links that it has been used to produce. Building on this work it then discusses how the paradigm, architecture and user interface of the DLS have been newly modified both in response to user feedback and also to allow more linking facilities to be added to the WWW environment. We then introduce AgentDLS, an agent-style system that offers suggestions to help the user's browsing and information discovery activities.